


Ode to Optophobia

by veryspecialone



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 12:11:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 47,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veryspecialone/pseuds/veryspecialone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, Ten Men Who Loved Annie Edison.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Andrew Cohen, pt I

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was begun after the end of season 2, and does not follow canon for seasons three or four. Yes, it took me that long to get around to finishing it. Title and scattered references are from the song "Ode to Optophobia" by Danielle Ate the Sandwich. I own nothing you recognize. Also, unbeta'd.
> 
> EDIT: 4/2/2014: Delayed credit for the inspiration (because I read it so long ago and only just realized I'd been influenced by it) goes to "In The House of the Quick and the Hungry" by Laura Laurent or Laura S'mora (depending on the hosting site), a lovely Ginny Weasley-centric fic from my teen years, found here at ffnet: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1975791/1/In-The-House-of-the-Quick-and-the-Hungry

When you're a young, conservative, well-bred Jewish man living in the most affluent area of Greendale, Colorado, being gay is not exactly an option. Andrew Cohen had always known this, on some level, even if it had never been explicitly stated to him.

 

It wasn't until much later in life that he started to understand that his sexuality wasn't about options, and before that happened, he broke Annie Edison's heart.

 

Andy had known Annie since Hebrew school. She was always a little bit heavy and she knew the answers to things they hadn't learned yet, and he could tell there was a pretty girl inside her just dying to get out who didn't know how. In ninth grade she got braces and she stopped smiling, despite the fact that she used to smile all the time. But she was still sweet, and driven, and somehow completely free of guile in a way that made Andy feel wise, even though her grades were markedly higher than his and they both knew it but never mentioned it. Andy knew his parents loved her, and her mother loved him, and despite himself, Andy liked Annie a lot too. And so junior year of high school they went to homecoming together. And then they went to the movies together most weekends, and by the time Annie asked him to Sadie Hawkins that year they were hanging out almost every night, and by the time prom came up they had just been a couple for some time. Annie had even started smiling again, even if it was only around him and the grin was full of metal and occasionally some leftover food.

 

So when homecoming rolled back around their senior year, it was kind of their one-year anniversary. At least, Annie claimed it as such, because it was the anniversary of their first date _and_ their first kiss, so it was more their anniversary than any other date and they _had_ to have an anniversary. So along with the corsage, Andy brought her a whole other bouquet of flowers and a tasteful silver necklace that she adored and immediately put on to wear to the dance. She even smiled wide, with teeth and all (her shiny braces were free of food) in the pictures their parents took in the gazebo in Andy's backyard while cooing about how cute they were. When they were safe from their parents in his car, Annie touched his thigh boldly (if rather close to his knee) and told him he'd be getting his present later that night. Andy smiled tightly and gently moved her hand so he could shift into drive.

 

They met up with some of his golf team pals and their dates for dinner. Annie didn't really have any friends that weren't Andy's friends; she used to hang out with a girl named Leah before she and Andy started dating, but now the two hadn't spoken in a few months and nobody mentioned it anymore. Andy knew while he was doing it that he was paying more attention to his friends than to Annie, especially his buddy Matt who was sitting across from him, but Annie seemed happy enough, if a bit quiet, sitting on his left side at the end of the table, clearing her whole plate slowly and daintily.

 

The dance was fun, in that high school homecoming dance way. Andy glanced around and saw guys grinding on girls in that way that he and Annie had agreed was totally distasteful, especially in public. He twirled her around expertly and she shrieked with laughter, catching Matt's attention where he was dancing nearby with his own date, Meghan, who was on the girls' golf team at Liberty High one town over. Andy met Matt's eye and Matt grinned brilliantly at him. Andy grinned back and twirled Annie again.

 

A few songs later Meghan and the other girls from the group took a mass trip to the bathroom. Annie hung back uncertainly until Meghan beckoned to her in a way that was less than affectionate but certainly more friendly than the treatment Andy knew Annie was used to from the girls at Riverside. When she looked at him hopefully for confirmation, Andy smiled and nodded at her encouragingly and she scampered off with the rest of the girls.

 

They were gone for a while and when they came back their eyes all seemed to be shining, but none more than Annie's. She tripped up to Andy happily and flung her arms around his neck, planting a kiss on his lips. She tasted like gin and Andy spotted, out of the corner of his eye, one of the other girls slipping a slim silver flask into her fancy beaded evening purse.

 

"Meghan's nice," Annie breathed in Andy's face.

 

"That's cool," said Andy, genuinely happy that Annie was getting along with the other girls, but wishing she had sucked on a breath mint or something before coming back out. "So we were just saying we'd probably get out of here soon. You know, before they do the court presentations...it's all downhill from there, right?"

 

"Yup!" Annie agreed, popping the "p" at the end of the word.

 

Andy couldn't help shaking his head and chuckling affectionately at her. Despite the gin taste, he kissed her gently before untangling her arms from around his neck and leading her back to the corner of the gym where they had all stashed their coats and purses.

 

The group all went to a burger joint for ice cream desserts to cram around a table meant for half the number of customers and wait out the other dance attendees until the after-party circuit started. The girls took two more bathroom trips and, while most of them just seemed to keep getting a little more giggly and snuggling closer to their dates, Annie started to have trouble getting the straw of her diet soda into her mouth. Andy nudged her with his shoulder.

 

"Annie," he ventured, "are you okay?"

 

"Yeah," she said distractedly. "Why does this straw keep moving?!" She nearly tipped the glass over before Andy caught it in time and she broke into laughter, which soon became a cough, which then morphed back into laughter.

 

Andy turned to Meghan on his other side, burrowed under Matt's arm. "Has she had a lot?"

 

"No," said Meghan, "why?" Andy gestured to his right and she grimaced after leaning forward to get a good look. "Yeesh. She didn't have any more than the rest of us. Is she on something?"

 

Andy just shook his head, not knowing if he was telling her "no" or that he didn't know.

 

"Andy," came Annie's voice from his other side, and she suddenly sounded miserable, "I don't feel very good."

 

"Oh god." Andy started to panic.

 

"It's okay," whispered Meghan. "She probably just needs to puke and she'll feel better." She slid out from the cramped mass around the table and touched Annie's arm. "Hey, Annie, do you want to go to the bathroom?"

 

Annie nodded and allowed Meghan to lead her there like a blind person, leaving her purse and the melting remnants of her dessert behind. Andy looked across the empty space that Meghan had left between them at Matt, who shrugged.

 

"I guess your girlfriend's a lightweight, huh?" Matt punched Andy in the arm. It wasn't hard enough to hurt, but Andy's other hand automatically drifted towards the spot to rub at it. "Who would have guessed?"

 

Andy frowned and Matt, to his credit, looked a little repentant. "Sorry, man."

 

Andy shook his head again. "Sorry about your date having to take care of mine. Maybe I should get her home."

 

"No," Zach protested from across the table, and Andy glanced over at him, having been unaware there was anyone else even listening. "Just bring her along to Carson's and get her stashed in one of the guest rooms. We were all supposed to stay there tonight anyway, right? This way you have a legit excuse to lay claim on one of the actual beds before you get stuck hooking up on the floor like the rest of us, man!"

 

Andy didn't get a chance to answer before a scream was heard from the direction of the restrooms. He and Matt both stood up in time to see Meghan hightailing it out of the ladies, her dress covered in... _oh._

 

Oh shit.

 

Matt took Meghan home to change before they went to Carson's, and Andy, after a very awkward trip into the girls' bathroom, managed to haul Annie back to his car.

 

She moaned from the backseat where she was lying down, "I ruined our senior homecoming."

 

"No," Andy denied, but only halfheartedly, because whether she meant to or not the rest of the night was pretty shot, and she probably wouldn't remember this in the morning anyway so the vehemence with which he defended her honor was probably of little importance.

 

"I did. And I ruined our anniversary," she said sadly and quietly before making a horrifying little gagging noise that thankfully seemed to come to nothing. "I didn't even get to give you your present."

 

"it's fine, Annie," Andy said inattentively, looking for an opening to turn left onto Route 34. He saw one that he could probably make, but would have put him directly in front of what he was sure was a cop, so he let it pass. "You can give it to me some other time."

 

"But it was supposed to be _tonight._ " Andy's girlfriend suddenly sounded like she was about four years old and he could tell that the waterworks that he had coaxed so precariously closed in the bathroom were about to open up again.

 

Andy sighed as he finally pulled out into traffic. "Well, is it in your room at home? You can give it to me when I'm sneaking you in, because there's no way you can do that by yourself right now."

 

"Andy!" Annie wailed. "The present was supposed to be _sex!_ "

 

Andy hit the brakes for the upcoming stop sign a little too fast and heard Annie, stretched across the backseat like it was a bed, tumble to the floor of the car. "OW!"

 

And the tears began again.

 

Miraculously, Andy and Annie made it inside Annie's house without waking Annie's mother. And their floor plan was one of those that had the master bedroom on the first floor and the other bedrooms on the second, so once they got upstairs Annie was pretty much home free. Andy thought he heard her mumble something about sleeping pills and remembered her telling him once, long ago, before she stopped talking about him, that her father was a chemist for a pharmaceutical company and that both her parents thought homeopathic remedies and all that were a load of crap, preferring the scientifically proven power of strong drugs. Andy had privately thought that was a shame, because Annie and her mother could probably both benefit from some yoga and a few calming teas. He wondered if either of them had ever considered Xanax.

 

Andy managed to get Annie to drink some water and take the pins out of her simple up-do so she could sleep on her hair. She was out of her shoes and in her bed and Andy was searching for the trash can in the dark to set by her bed when Annie slurred, "Meghan's not going to like me anymore."

 

"I'm sure it's fine," Andy lied smoothly, because he saw the look on Meghan's face when she came storming out of that bathroom with Annie's secondhand ice cream sundae covering the front of her slinky homecoming dress, so he kind of agreed with Annie on that count, but the last thing he wanted to do was upset her more.

 

"Andy?"

 

"Yeah, sweetie?" Andy sat on the very edge of her bed and stroked her hair. It was nice hair, a deep rich brown as opposed to a dull one, and while it was too long and a little damaged and stringy at the ends, the roots were thick and healthy with a nice sheen, and soft to the touch. Annie's hair was like Annie, Andy reflected, trying so hard to be healthy and beautiful without knowing what was going wrong to keep it from its goals. He made a mental note to suggest that she cut off the several inches of waste at the ends, sometime when she would remember him making the suggestion.

 

"I'm sorry."

 

"I know."

 

Andy found out from a text the next afternoon that Annie was okay, if excruciatingly hung over, and that her mother didn't seem to be any the wiser. He was a little nervous that Annie might try to give him her belated anniversary gift the next weekend, even though she acted normal for the next week (perhaps she didn't remember the conversation, or maybe she was just embarrassed that she had yelled the word "sex" in his car when she had spent days putting together a three-minute oral presentation in health class because she had to design it around the avoidance of that very word), which Andy was thankful for. He still hadn't decided what it meant that his response to Annie's drunken declaration of her intentions was to slam on the brakes of his car so that she fell over. So Andy was strangely relieved when he noticed a lone folded dollar bill sticking out of the back pocket of Annie's knee-length denim skirt when she was sitting in front of him in algebra on Thursday, knowing that gave him another five to seven days to mull it over (if that health class had taught him correctly). So instead, they went to the movies to see the remake of "The Women."

 

The next weekend, Annie had a Mock U.N. event.

 

The weekend after that, Andy had a weekend retreat with the rest of the golf team. He roomed with Matt at the hotel, a swanky one attached to the course they were going to be playing the next day. Zach and a few other guys sneaked in to hang out after they were sure the coach was asleep. Zach and Matt got into a brief wrestling match on Matt's bed, which Matt won, and after everyone had left Andy spent what he was sure was too much time thinking about if he had been the one Matt was wrestling.

 

The next weekend, Andy and Annie had sex.

 

They were in Andy's room, having another one of their marathons of "The O.C." on DVD, which meant Andy was watching the show and Annie had her U.S. History book out and was filling out flashcards with important terms and looking up very briefly upon the completion of every card to check in with the show and take a handful of popcorn, able to switch her focus with a proficiency that Andy, accustomed to this routine, still occasionally had trouble believing. She had just finished the card for the second assassination attempt on Gerald Ford, and Ryan Atwood, predictably, had just punched someone, and Annie said, with a piece of popcorn halfway to her mouth, "Oh! Doesn't Benjamin Mackenzie look a little bit like your friend Matt from this angle?"

 

That particular kernel of popcorn never made it to Annie's mouth, but instead got squished somewhere underneath her back as Andy tackled her to the bed, kissing her.

 

The foreplay was brief, consisting mostly of the move from the bed to the floor of Andy's walk-in closet with a quick pit stop to his underwear drawer for a condom, and the removal of only the necessary clothes. He had looked around the room at one point, seeing the brightness of it with the sunlight streaming in the tastefully treated windows, and suggested the relocation to Annie as a way to keep his parents from hearing them. It wasn't like it wasn't big enough, anyway. It was Annie who had taken the suggestion a step further and grabbed the remotes from his bedside table, pausing "The O.C." and pressing play on the remote to the music player on his laptop.

 

"Erotica" began to play as Andy slammed the door of the closet behind them. By the time the pulsing beat of "Fever" drifted through the closed door into the dark space, it was over. Andy lifted his forehead from where he had practically glued it to Annie's soft white shoulder and looked at her, his eyes finally adjusted to the darkness. He expected to find her crying, whether from the overwhelming emotions or the discomfort he had heard all girls were supposed to have their first time, or simply because she was Annie and crying was what she did. He was surprised to find that her eyes were dry, and even more surprised to find that his own were not. He rolled off of her quickly and rearranged his clothes so that he was no longer in a state of disarray, and tried to catch his breath and stop his tears. He wondered if Annie noticed. She said nothing, just snuggled up to his side and kissed him near his ear with a little sigh.

 

They didn't do it again. Three weeks later, Andy broke up with her. He knew she was devastated, easily apparent to him by the way that she doubled her already considerable efforts in classes and started coming to school showing obvious signs of sleep deprivation. Andy also knew that she probably thought it was because of the sex. And, well...frankly, it was, though she had nothing to do with it. But before Andy got the chance to explain this to her, before he got the chance to work it out enough to even explain it to himself, he found himself watching, as if it were a movie in slow motion, as Annie Edison propelled herself through a plate glass door during Andrew's lunch period and was taken away in an ambulance.


	2. Andrew Cohen, pt II

Andrew has heard that after rehab, Annie went to Greendale Community College. She never even transferred out. He assumes she received a degree from there because he never heard otherwise. And there's always been a nagging feeling in the back of Andrew's mind, whenever he allows himself to think of Annie, that it's at least partially his fault she ended up at a third-rate community college down the street from the house she grew up in, while Andrew actually left Greendale and went to Sonoma State. He knows now that the behavior he perceived as depression over their breakup was due to the amplification of what was apparently a somewhat longstanding addiction to Adderall (he fights back another twinge of guilt at this thought, too, that he was too absorbed in his own life drama to notice that his inadvertent beard of a girlfriend had a pill addiction), but sometimes, when he's lying in bed and letting his mind wander, it wanders to wondering whether Annie would have broken down and broken through that door had it not been for Andrew.

 

All said, it's close to ten years before Andrew stops wondering, and the reason he stops wondering is that Annie Edison walks into the restaurant in Denver at which Andrew works.

 

When Andrew gets his first look at her that night, he almost drops the bottle of sangiovese he's uncorking to let breathe. When he gets his second look at her, he's not entirely sure it's her. The extra weight is gone, and so are the braces. Her hair is a several inches shorter and Andrew notes that (assuming it is indeed her) he was right all those years ago about it just needing a good cut to be a shiny, swingy, shampoo-commercial dream. Her companion says something in her ear as they wait at the hostess podium to be seated and she giggles, bouncing on the balls of her feet and smiling brilliantly up at him, and Andrew knows then that it's her.

 

So he does the only logical thing to do, and ducks underneath the bar to hide.

 

He can hear her voice drawing closer, chattering away about someone named Shirley, and prays that they're having dinner, not coming to sit at the bar. It sounds to Andrew like they are indeed getting a table, but Andrew can still hear Annie clearly enough -- now answering a question about someone named Ben -- that he knows their table is much too close to the bar for his liking. In fact, it's likely to be table eight, the closest one. Andrew silently curses the hostess as his left leg starts to cramp in his crouched position.

 

"Andrew?" comes a question from above him, and Andrew looks up to see Nicole, the bartender on shift, staring down at him. "What the hell are you--"

 

"Shhhh!" Andrew hisses at her before she can finish the question.

 

Nicole sweeps a glance across the nearly-empty bar, and then, looking like she can't believe she's having to do this, crouches down to Andrew's level. "Are you hiding? Seriously?"

 

Andrew heaves a sigh and shoots her a look that he hopes conveys his own disbelief at the situation. "My ex just came in and sat down for dinner."

 

Nicole's eyebrows shoot up with some shock and no small amount of delight. "Ooh, who?" She stands back up and with a complete lack of subtlety scans the dining area. "Right there, table eight?" she asks out of the corner of her mouth with her voice thankfully lowered and her eyes fixed on where Andrew knows Annie to be seated. Nicole's tact seems to have reached its limit, though, because when Andrew nods painfully she crouches right back down in a flash. "He's hot!" she nearly squeals. "I didn't think you liked them quite that old, but well done, you!"

 

"Right table, wrong person," Andrew grits out.

 

Nicole frowns. "But he's here with a g--…oh, _Andrew._ " Her eyes go wide, and even though she's blonde-haired and green-eyed, Andrew has to shut his eyes against the expression that has always reminded him of Annie. "The girl from high school?" Nicole asks in a whisper.

 

"That's the one," Andrew says with his eyes still closed.

 

"Well, you can't hide down here during their whole dinner," Nicole reasons.

 

Andrew snaps open his eyes and growls, "Well, I can't just pop up from out of nowhere when I've been hiding back here for the last five minutes!"

 

Nicole just gestures to the door to the kitchen behind her, and after letting his mouth hang open for a minute, Andrew clenches his jaw and actually crawls through it, Nicole helpfully standing to walk through it herself so the door doesn't appear to be manipulated by an invisible person to anyone one the other side of the bar. When he's safely out of Annie's field of vision, Andrew stands straight and brushes off his pants with as much dignity as he can muster, which isn't much since Nicole is giggling through her hands and there are two busboys staring at him.

 

"Oh, suck it," Andrew snarls to the busboys, then turns to Nicole, who is nicely trying to control herself, but unfortunately failing. "Will you please go out there?" Andrew begs. "I'll come out, I will. I just…I need a minute."

 

The look on Andrew's face seems to put a damper on Nicole's giggles and she nods, pushing back through the door to the space behind the bar. Andrew runs a hand through his hair in frustration and then immediately regrets it, because he has to spend the next three minutes arranging it back into place in the mirrored surface of the freezer door, which gives back a distorted reflection, but Andrew's been here long enough to be able to work with it. He's just about ready to ease quietly back into his position at the bar and hope Annie doesn't look in his direction when the new waitress, whose name Andrew hasn't bothered to learn yet, comes in.

 

"There you are," she squeaks breathlessly. "The guy at table eight wants to see the sommelier. That's you, right?"

 

Oh shit.

 

"Yeah." Andrew remains still.

 

The waitress gazes at him. "So...are you gonna go?"

 

"In a minute," he snaps, and the waitress stammers out an apology and stumbles out.

 

Andrew looks back at the freezer one more time, giving his carnival-mirror self his best practiced smile, then squares his shoulders and marches into the dining area. As he approaches, though, his gait slows. Annie's not at the table, though her jacket still is. She must be in the restroom. Andrew quickly redoubles his pace, hoping to get the conversation over with before Annie returns so he can postpone what's certain to be one of the more awkward conversations in his life, and that includes the ones with all of the family members he had to come out to. Catching Andrew's arrival out of the corner of his eye, the man at table eight looks up at him, and Andrew gets a good look at him for the first time.

 

Wow.

 

Nicole was right, he is hot. Long and lean, with sharp eyes and a mouth that seems to have a smirk tugging at the ends of it even now. He's wearing a suit that Andrew could probably calculate the astronomical price of to the nearest dollar, which is offset by that perfect level of scruff that Andrew had spent the better part of his twenty-fourth year trying to accomplish. The thing is, Nicole was also right about him being older. Andrew calculates him to be in his late thirties at the very least, probably more like forty judging by those crinkles around his eyes as he smiles politely at Andrew. "You're the sommelier?"

 

Andrew nods back, even more politely. "Yes, sir."

 

The man turns his head to face Andrew more fully and now that the light is hitting him right, Andrew can see that his nose is kind of pointed but the eyes are a clear blue and oh god, Andrew had always scoffed at gay couples with big age gaps but he could be so into this guy. He hardly seems like Annie's type, though. Ever since Andrew had heard about Annie going to Greendale, he had tried to quiet his guilty conscience by imagining that she had met one of those carefree hippie guys that always seemed to populate the campus whenever he and Annie walked by, and that the hippie guy had completely mellowed Annie out and she was much happier now. Maybe they're not together. Maybe they're colleagues. Maybe he's her stepfather. Did her mother remarry?

 

The man is talking again. "New waitress, I'm assuming?"

 

"Sir?"

 

"Our waitress," the man clarifies. "Erica." ( _That's_ her name.) "I wouldn't have called you out here, but I don't think she really knows her way around the wine list yet."

 

"Of course, sir. It's not a problem. That's why I'm here," says Andrew genially. He's probably Annie's boss. She's always gotten along very well with authority figures. "Have you chosen your entrée for the evening yet?"

 

"I have, but I don't know-- oh, just a minute, here comes my girlfriend."

 

Andrew's sent reeling hard enough from the shock of _that_ little nugget of information that he doesn't have time to hoist a convincing look of surprise on his face, or even decide to act surprised, before Annie rounds the table again and he hears what he's been dreading since her saw her walk in.

 

"Andy?"

 

So the only option left in Andrew's arsenal is to face her, try to turn his grimace into as much of a smile as possible, and say, "Hi, Annie."

 

And there's the expression.

 

"Andy," says Annie again, without the question mark at the end and without blinking. That stare is unnerving.

 

Thankfully, Annie's boyfriend (!) seems to be impatient. A throat clears to Andrew's right and that dry, appealingly deep voice says, "I'm gonna take a wild stab and say you two have met."

 

Annie slips back into her seat and Andrew is left standing, a little awkwardly, trying to decide if it would be more awkward if she had remained standing. "Um, yeah," she says, addressing her boyfriend now. "Andy, this is Jeff Winger," she introduces with an impressive amount of grace considering the situation. "Jeff, this is Andrew Cohen...from high school?" Her voice drops a little in volume and rises in pitch on the last three words as if she's trying to make sure Jeff understands the gravity of the situation without explaining it.

 

Jeff merely raises his eyebrows at Annie with a tiny incredulous smile, an action which she returns, and turns that same face to Andy. He half-rises out of his chair to shake Andrew's hand. "Well. Andrew. It's, uh...nice to meet you."

 

"Same," says Andrew, not sure if either of them are lying or not. "So how long have you two been..." unable to make himself finish the question, he does that awkward gesture where he points vaguely back and forth between the two to indicate a relationship.

 

Annie hems and haws. "Oh, god, it's been, um..."

 

"Six and a half years," cuts in Jeff with a gleam.

 

"Not counting time we spent broken up," Annie chides him gently.

 

"Fine," Jeff concedes. "Six and a half years, minus a week."

 

"Three!"

 

"Two."

 

"This isn't a negotiation, Dirtbag Esquire."

 

"Three weeks is how long we went without going on a date," Jeff rattles off, clearly unfazed by Annie's feeble insult. "One week is how long we went without kissing, and two weeks is how--"

 

" _Fine,_ " Annie yelps. "Two weeks."

 

Simultaneously, Annie and Jeff look back up at Andrew as if they had just remembered he was there. Before he can stop himself, Andrew lifts his hand a little and wiggles his fingers in a dismal imitation of a wave, uncomfortably aware of just how gay he looks right now. Annie's eyes widen again. Jeff stifles a snort of laughter.

 

"So, are _you_...um, seeing anyone?" Annie's cheeks turn a little pink as she asks.

 

And even though Andrew is, in fact, seeing someone (his name is Sean and they're looking for a bigger place so they can move in together and buy a dog), he just says, "Not right now."

 

Before there can be an awkward silence Jeff jumps back into the conversation. "So if you went to Riverside, you must know Troy too."

 

Andrew stares at him for a moment, sure he's heard wrong. "Troy. You mean, Troy _Barnes?_ "

 

"Yeah."

 

"The keg stand football guy?" Andrew addresses this one to Annie and she nods, turning pinker, and Andrew remembers the crush she thought he didn't know about while they were dating. Andrew turns back to Jeff. "Um, sure, a little bit. You know Troy?"

 

"He's a friend of ours," says Jeff smoothly. "Annie lived with him."

 

Andrew feels dizzy for a moment and he might look it, too, because Annie hastily cuts in, "Not like that!" She glares at Jeff, who seems unapologetic and merely takes a sip of his water. "We're just very very good friends," she tells Andrew firmly.

 

"Two 'very's.' Interesting," Jeff comments into his water glass.

 

Annie narrows her eyes at him and asks plaintively, "Can you _ever_ shut up?"

 

"I don't feel like it," Jeff says simply. Andrew both wants to punch Jeff in his pointed nose and stick his tongue down Jeff's throat.

 

"So I heard you went to Sonoma?" Annie asks Andrew, apparently deciding that ignoring Jeff is the best way to go, and through that method Andrew and Annie exchange the bullet points of their last decade: Andrew's time at Sonoma, his degree in English and oenology, how he's been working as a sommelier for some time to save up money. Annie volleys back with the only slightly defiant proclamation that she spent four years at Greendale, before doing her master's in health administration at Regis, and she's been in Denver ever since. The "with Jeff" part of that statement goes unspoken but hangs in the air like Jeff's smirk hangs on his face. Andrew's keeping his ears open for any explanation of how they met, or any reason Annie would be dating someone so obviously at least a decade her senior, but she doesn't drop a hint, almost as if she's stopped noticing.

 

Maybe she has.

 

"I can't believe we haven't run into each other before," finishes Annie.

 

"You probably just run in different circles," says Jeff cuttingly.

 

Andrew takes that chance to finally get back to the topic of their entrées, and a few minutes later the three of them have picked out a wine. When Andrew returns with the bottle, he finds Jeff folding his long torso over the corner of the table to kiss Annie deeply and determinedly. Andrew had decided in the time it took him to get to the cellar that this is pretty much the last guy he would have ever pictured Annie Edison with, and he's not sure how much he likes the situation. After all, Andrew's decade of guilt over Annie's pharmaceutical and educational fate has left him with an unshakable feeling of responsibility towards her in her absence.

 

But then he got a text from Sean while he was retrieving the bottle, announcing that Sean has picked up a movie and a box of those cookies that they both love (but can only bring themselves to eat about once a month) for later that night, and Andrew keeps his mouth shut while he pours a sample of the wine into Jeff's glass for him to taste, and smiles every time he passes table eight that night.

 

Annie takes two more trips to the bathroom during dinner that Andrew can see; he can also see that she's drinking one or two glasses of water to match every glass of wine and tries not to think about the night that probably encouraged that behavior -- another night when she had taken several trips to the bathroom. But every time she comes back (Andrew's trying not to stare, he swears, but the night is just too surreal for him to have very much control over where his eyes fall when he's out on the floor) she's steady on her high heels (when did Annie start wearing high heels? All right, she's twenty-seven now, but the Annie in Andrew's head wears flats...of course, she also has braces and some lingering acne and about twenty extra pounds) and beaming at Jeff as soon as she sees him. And Jeff, a little surprisingly, grins back every time.

 

Andrew's hiding in the kitchen again for a brief five-minute respite when Erica comes in to ask where the desserts for table eight are.

 

"Almost ready," calls a voice from deeper within the kitchen. "It's been what, three minutes since they ordered? Jesus Christ. Should I spit in it?"

 

"No!" says Erica, looking horrified. "No, the woman just went to the bathroom" (trip number three, thinks Andrew) "and her boyfriend gave me this to sneak into her sorbet!" and she holds up a sparkling diamond ring as the horrified look slides off of her face easily. Andrew's left knee gives out and he slips about a foot down the wall he's leaning against before he manages to catch himself. Erica spots his fumble out of the corner of her eye and turns to him. "I know, right? He doesn't seem like the engagement-ring-in-the-dessert type to me. But what do I know?" She disappears behind a shelf to put the ring in its rightful place in Annie's dessert.

 

Even though Erica is still clueless when it comes to the wine their restaurant sells, though, Andrew thinks she was right about this one. From his initial read on Jeff Winger, the man is undoubtedly not the engagement-ring-in-the-dessert type.

 

But Annie Edison is.

 

Erica passes by Andrew again, the two desserts on a tray. She pauses by him, smiling excitedly. "Don't you want to come watch?" she buzzes.

 

Andrew shakes his head. "Nah," he says in a practiced imitation of nonchalance. "I've seen plenty of them. You'll get used to them too. Go enjoy this one, though. You'll always remember your first," he adds, winking at Erica in that slightly dirty way that he's aware he only gets away with because he's gay.

 

Erica nods good-naturedly at him and once more disappears, this time through the swinging door that will take her back out to the floor, to table eight, and to the soon-to-be-engaged couple of Annie and Jeff.

 

Andrew gives it another ten minutes after Erica comes back into the kitchen, face shining with vicarious happiness, and gives him a thumbs-up, before venturing back out onto the floor. Annie doesn't look at him, her eyes flickering back and forth to fixate either on her newly adorned left hand or her newly declared fiancé's face. Her ability to give each object her full and undivided attention and immediately switch to the other with equal focus is still mesmerizing -- at least, it is to Andrew, who had come to accept that this particular talent was born of her Adderall use and is sort of happy to be proven wrong...and to Jeff, who hasn't taken his eyes off of Annie once. Her sorbet sits in front of her, mostly uneaten and slowly melting.

 

Annie doesn't glance at Andrew again until she and Jeff are rising to leave. Jeff is helping her slip her coat over her arms to protect her from the early fall chill in the Denver air, and she meets Andrew's eyes as she flips her hair out of the collar, looking unsurprised to find him already looking at her. She smiles brilliantly at him -- those braces really did do their job in the end -- and mouths "bye," as if he were a casual friend she ran into often and was perpetually sure to see again any day now. Andrew mouths it back with his own smile, likely the most sincere one he's displayed in hours. Jeff drapes an arm over Annie's shoulders and, with one last cheeky gleam back at Andrew, opens the plate-glass door for her and pulls a valet ticket from his jacket before the door closes behind them and Andrew can no longer see the pair in the weak glow of light from the moodily lit restaurant.


	3. Jordan Harding, pt I

Jordan Harding was no stranger to the experience of being a pupil's favorite teacher at Riverside High School. Perhaps he didn't garner quite the adoring praise and cult-like following as some of the younger, more attractive and progressive teachers who taught subjects more inherently intriguing than U.S. History, but he preferred being liked and respected, and being the favorite of the more discerning students. In the last edition of the school paper published every year, the seniors would all fill out a questionnaire and their answers would be published en masse: "What was your most embarrassing moment?" "What are you leaving behind at this school?" "Where will you and your friends be in ten years?" On the page dedicated to students naming their favorite teachers, Jordan was always guaranteed a respectable number of mentions. It wasn't why he taught, of course, but it did provide some assurance of a job well done and he had grown somewhat used to a steady level of appreciation.

 

There was no experience, however, quite like being Annie Edison's favorite teacher. It was, to speak frankly, a heady ordeal. She was a dedicated and singularly focused student, as unreserved in her adoration for Jordan as she was in her zealousness for schoolwork. Which, considering the fact that the latter caused her to develop a habit for Adderall so strong that she started hallucinating about robots in the middle of Jordan's review of _Dred Scott v. Sandford_ for their upcoming midterm, was truly saying something. It was also the reason Jordan was now in his classroom on the second day of winter break, waiting for Annie to arrive for the make-up exam the counselor had arranged, while he shuffled through test papers.

 

"Hey, Mr. Harding." The voice that came from his doorway was familiar, as were the words it spoke, but it was also uncharacteristically glum. Jordan looked up to see Annie Edison hovering in his doorway. "Did they tell you I was coming in?"

 

"Of course, Annie," Jordan said warmly. "Come on in. I'm ready to start whenever you are."

 

Annie nodded and slumped into the room. She took her usual seat at the front of the room, slipping off her coat and draping it over the chair before sitting and digging through her backpack for a pencil. Jordan saw, with a wince, the bandages that still covered a few cuts on her arms. He had watched the ambulance take Annie away several days earlier, and remembered the nauseating sight of her blood on the floor, surrounded by hushed, wide-eyed students. Annie yawned, meeting Jordan's gaze, and he quickly averted his eyes to the test he was holding. He stood from his desk and walked up to Annie's desk, putting the test in front of her.

 

Annie, when she saw the thickness of the stapled stack of paper, whimpered a little bit before seeming to catch herself and instead looked up at Jordan with some attempt at her normal attentive expression that fell sadly short. "My mom said I should be sure to thank you for coming in when we're on break," she mumbled.

 

"It's not a problem, Annie," said Jordan, reassuringly. "I hope you're…feeling better."

 

She nodded unconvincingly and turned back to the test with resignation. Jordan returned to his desk and started grading the copies of that same test that her classmates had completed on the day of the exam. He had just finished covering Troy Barnes's test in a disturbing quantity of red ink when Annie spoke again.

 

"Mr. Harding?"

 

Jordan looked up.

 

Annie's eyes were shifting back and forth. They were the only part of her that looked animated at all. Her arm was draped listlessly across her desk where her pencil hung from her fingers and her back hunched over so far that Jordan had a sudden memory of this same girl strapped into a back brace the previous year. "Is it okay if I go to the bathroom?"

 

"Of course," answered Jordan with an allowing gesture of his hand. Annie rose and, hesitantly, started to reach for her backpack until Jordan halted her with "Annie, I can't let you bring your backpack out with you."

 

"Please?" Annie begged.

 

"It's not that I think you'll cheat," Jordan reasoned with her, "but you know my rules when taking exams."

 

"But I just…" Annie looked terrified. "I need something in it."

 

Jordan stared at her in confusion until it dawned on him. "Annie."

 

Annie burst into tears.

 

Jordan watched helplessly as she collapsed back into her chair, dropping her face down on her desk. He stood and again approached her, this time reaching out and putting a hand on her shoulder, which only served to make her cry harder. Through the sobs, he thought he could make out "just this once" and "need an A" and " _Dartmouth._ " She seemed to tire herself out quickly, though; Jordan thought privately that this had probably been happening a lot lately. Finally she raised her head with enormous effort, sniffling.

 

"Annie," Jordan began, not sure how to broach the subject, but he should have remembered that drugs or not, Annie Edison had never needed encouragement to talk to Jordan.

 

"I just can't remember anything," she moaned. "I tried to study in the hospital, and when I got home, but I'm so tired all the time and I couldn't concentrate and I kept having to re-check which of the Union states allowed slavery like six times. I wanted to try to do it on my own, Mr. Harding, I really did, but I have to get A's on all my midterms because those are the grades that are gonna be on my applications and all of a sudden it just seemed like _so many tests,_ like, _way_ more tests than I could handle on my own and so I just went to sleep instead because I don't know if I mentioned it, but I'm _really_ tired. I think I may have caught something in the hospital, so maybe if we just...rescheduled..." Annie trailed off as if she was aware of how weak this sounded.

 

"Annie," Jordan said as gently as he could. He hadn't been trained for this. Nothing in his life had prepared him for having to tell one of his favorite students, "You're not sick. You're in withdrawal."

 

Annie began to cry again with renewed vigor. Jordan retrieved the box of tissues from his desk, setting them down in front of her and settling into the desk next to hers. She gurgled a "thanks" and tried to wipe her nose daintily, then gave up and just blew. When her eyes were again dry, she turned to Jordan and whispered desperately, "Couldn't I just take one? One more time? Just for the test? It's my last one, I promise. My mom flushed all the others."

 

"You know I can't let you do that, Annie," Jordan said apologetically as he held out his hand expectantly.

 

She nodded in dismay and handed Jordan her backpack, looking despondent and at this moment, very young. And she was young, Jordan reminded himself, only seventeen, and for all her book smarts couldn't conceive right now that there would be life after detox. He started to root through her backpack but couldn't find any pills. He looked at Annie, questioningly.

 

She was watching him. "It's sewn into the lining underneath the name tag," Annie admitted. "It was my emergency stash."

 

And there it was, in a little plastic bag, blue and white and very small, and not at all looking like it could ruin a bright, young, idealistic girl's life. Jordan told her to wait at her desk and he would be right back. He took the pill to the teacher's bathroom and flushed it down the toilet like all the others had gone. When he returned, he found Annie back at work on her midterm.

 

"Annie," Jordan said as he walked towards her, "we don't have to do this today."

 

"No, I do," she insisted, not looking up from her test. "I have to take this exam and get back on track with my winter break studying. I'm putting this behind me. That's what my mom-- that's what we decided."

 

Jordan has met Ellen Edison before, and while she was perfectly polite and even friendly to her daughter's favorite teacher who gave her shiny gold stars on all of her history papers, Jordan doubted very much that the decision to put Annie's addiction in the past was at all a mutual decision. His suspicions were confirmed in his mind when he caught sight of one more tear falling on Annie's test paper, despite her face still being turned away from him as she bent over her desk. Jordan stood in front of Annie's desk and snatched the paper from under her, her pencil leaving a long dark streak down the page where it had been pressed down in mid-word.

 

"Mr. Harding!" Annie cried, frustrated and a little scandalized.

 

"What is it you want to do, Annie?" Jordan pressed, knowing quite well that he was overstepping the boundaries he himself had set with all of his students for the last dozen years. "Do you want to put this behind you?"

 

Annie stared wordlessly at him. Her eyes were still red-rimmed and her nose was a bright pink.

 

"Annie?"

 

She started to shake her head frantically. "I...I just..." Her eyes were wide as if she was shocked by what was about to come out of her mouth. "I don't want to feel like this anymore," she managed.

 

There was a long pause as the two regarded each other: student and teacher, each others' favorites, on the precipice of a decision. Jordan nodded. "All right then. Come over here."

 

His laptop was open on his desk. Annie propped herself up against the wall behind him where she could see over his shoulder, but when she saw him pull up the web page for Arapahoe House, she stood straight.

 

"Mr. Harding," she protested, "I can't do rehab. My mom..."

 

"You said you didn't want to feel this way anymore," Jordan reminded her. "I can't tell you what to do. I can tell you that you have options other than sweeping this whole thing under the rug, and that one of them involves me having a connection to this facility."

 

Annie stared at the computer screen. "My mom..." was all that came out of her mouth.

 

Jordan spun his chair to look at her directly and did something that he had never done in his twelve years of teaching high school. He took his student's hands and held them in his own. "Annie, I'm sure you and your mother love each other very much. And I'm sure she thinks she's doing what's best for you. But you're very nearly an adult."

 

Annie was now peering down at the place where her small hands completely disappeared into Jordan's larger ones. "I turn eighteen next Monday," she murmured.

 

"This is a decision you can make for yourself," Jordan told her firmly. "It's your life. You can decide how this is going to happen."

 

Annie nodded and took three deep breaths. Jordan waited for her, until she lifted her head to meet his eyes again. "I'd be dropping out of high school, wouldn't I?"

 

Jordan hesitated, but could see no way around it. A minimum 90-day program, even if she entered it the moment she turned eighteen, would take up the vast majority of the second semester of her senior year, if not extend past the end of it. Instead of trying to avoid the issue, he simply said "yes."

 

"No more high school," Annie breathed, and for a moment it seemed to Jordan like a glimmer was about to enter her eye, but the next second it was gone. Jordan wasn't terribly surprised that this was the first bright side Annie seemed to be glimpsing. He had heard her new nickname whispered around the school -- unfortunately, not exclusively from students -- and knew it could only be a matter of time before she learned about it, if she hadn't already.

 

"You can still study at Arapahoe," Jordan promised. "They have an on-site school where you can get your GED. You could still go to college."

 

Annie let out a vague snort, withdrawing her hands from Jordan's. "Yeah. A good school's really going to take me now."

 

"Annie, this isn't the end of the world!" Jordan urged her. "Plenty of people have setbacks that still go on to do great things. You can do a couple of semesters over at Greendale, or City College. Get good grades. You know you can. And then transfer. But if you want to get yourself help, you know what you have to do. Do you want help?"

 

Annie's eyes flicked once more towards her midterm, sitting where Jordan had thrown it on his desk next to his laptop. She hadn't yet finished the first page. "Yes."

 

"Okay then," settled Jordan. "Have a seat and I'll make some calls."

 

"You're sure your...connection will be able to get me in?" asked Annie, sinking back into her desk and looking grateful to be sitting again. "I know their youth program can only take twenty at a time..." At Jordan's glance, she confessed, "I may have done a little bit of research."

 

"We might as well try to figure something out," Jordan said as optimistically as he could. He glanced back at the page for the youth program he had on his screen and tried not to cringe visibly as he spotted one of the bullet points about ideal candidates for residential care: youth who were unlikely to benefit from outpatient treatment due to their environment, including "no support for recovery."

 

The next hour was spent not on Annie's make-up exam, the activity for which that time had been allotted, but on the logistics of getting Annie admitted to Arapahoe. After confirming with Jordan that she had some money saved up, and that her father "wasn't an issue," as Annie put it quite firmly, Jordan made phone call after phone call as he called in and promised favor after favor, and dropped his voice to a hush as Annie finally drifted off for about twenty minutes.

 

The clock struck noon and Jordan, reluctantly, crossed over to Annie's desk and nudged her awake. "Annie," he said softly. "It's twelve. Your mother will be coming to pick you up any minute."

 

Annie nodded blearily and stood to put on her jacket before slinging her backpack over her shoulders. Maybe it was the power nap and maybe it was purely his own hopeful perceptions, but it looked to Jordan like maybe the backpack was weighing a little less on her shoulders now than it had been when she walked in, even though only one little pill was missing.

 

"So..." Annie was saying. "Did you...I mean, am I..."

 

"They'll be ready for you on the day after your birthday," Jordan told her. "Here's the information you'll need," he added, handing her a piece of paper. Annie turned it over to check the back and saw that it was the last page of her history exam, left blank and torn off for re-purposing.

 

Annie exhaled in a whoosh. "Okay," she said. "Okay," she repeated, a little more softly, as if to herself. 

 

"Who knows," Jordan couldn't stop himself from saying, "maybe your mother will come around."

 

Annie shook her head while continuing to read the piece of paper she'd been given. "She won't," she said almost absently, like the words were in her mouth already without requiring the assistance of a single thought to break free. She met Jordan's eyes and though he was expecting her to have to search her fatigued mind for words again, she only said immediately, "Thank you, Mr. Harding."

 

Jordan nodded at her. There wasn't a lot else to say. "Good luck."

 

She didn't hug him. She only smiled, the first one Jordan had seen from her since she walked in, and probably in weeks if he thought about it, and that was when he saw it. "Hey, you got your braces off!"

 

"Oh," said Annie, remembering. "Yeah, I did. Yesterday."

 

"They look great," said Jordan honestly, and Annie flushed with pleasure. She picked up the little pile of used tissues that she had collected on her desk by the tips of her fingers and left the classroom, depositing them in the trash can on her way out.

 

That spring, when the senior edition of the school newspaper was released three weeks prior to the end of term, Jordan was mentioned as a favorite teacher three times. A week after graduation, he received an e-mail from Annie that she had completed her program, had just signed a lease on her own apartment, and would be starting at Greendale in the fall. He read the school paper with a smile and then recycled it, like always. He printed the e-mail and hung it on his refrigerator.


	4. Jordan Harding, pt II

Jordan turns the corner leading to the administration office at precisely half past eleven and, as he knew he would, sees Annie Edison handing over her driver's license for identification confirmation before receiving a visitor's pass, which she peels off and sticks carefully, dutifully, to her cardigan. She looks up and sees Jordan, then waves enthusiastically at him. They start towards each other, meeting in the middle, and Annie greets him with a brief hug. "Hi, Mr. Harding." When they break apart she looks around at the entrance hallway and whispers to herself, "Wow."

 

"Strange to be back?"

 

Annie grins. "'Strange' is one way of putting it."

 

Suddenly it hits Jordan. "You haven't…is this the first time you've been back here since…you left?"

 

"You mean since I dropped out," Annie corrects. "It's okay, Mr. Harding. If anyone's allowed to phrase it that way, it's you. Oh, that mural is new, isn't it?"

 

Jordan glances down at the floor, fleetingly studying the scuffed tile between his own loafers and Annie's high heels. The combination of the extra three inches they give her and the improvement in her posture puts Annie much closer to Jordan's own eye level than he remembers her at. He looks back up at her and she's smiling.

 

"Yeah," she confirms, "it's the first time I've been back." Annie glances around again. "I don't know what I was expecting it to be like…it just feels like a building now."

 

Jordan considers telling her that it was only ever a building, then immediately decides against it. "We have a few minutes if you want to come to the lounge for a quick cup of coffee."

 

"Ooh, that'd be great. I got up really early this morning for the drive over here. I think I'm starting to fade a little."

 

The entrance to the teachers' lounge is right around the corner Jordan has just turned, so they're there in steps. Jordan opens the door for Annie and she steps through with only an inkling of the pause that accompanies many an initial entrance into a once-forbidden space. Jordan pours them both coffee into disposable cups from a stack in the cabinet above the sink and adds sugar to Annie's before bringing it to her where she has settled in at the nearest table and asking her, "Why so early? It's not that long of a drive here from Denver, the last time I checked."

 

Annie blows on the surface of her coffee. "Oh, no. We decided to make some plans for breakfast as long as we were coming out, though." She takes a tiny sip, slurping just a little bit to temper the scalding heat.

 

"We?" Jordan asks absently, turning back to the little counter space to add creamer to his own coffee and swirl it in with a wooden stirring stick.

 

"Oh!"

 

Jordan looks over at Annie at her exclamation. She doesn't seem to have spilled or burned her tongue. Her cheeks have gone slightly pink and she looks suddenly excited. "Jeff came with me," she explains. "We had breakfast with his mother."

 

"That sounds nice," says Jordan slowly. He knows Annie has a boyfriend named Jeff with whom she lives in Denver; he also knows they met back at Greendale and have been dating for several years, so he's not sure why the mention of Jeff or his mother has made Annie jumpy.

 

But Annie's positively beaming at him. "It was." She starts to squirm a little in her chair like she's sixteen years old again and is the only one who knows the answer to a question in class, but is stopping herself from raising her hand because she's already answered every question correctly so far that period and her classmates are starting to mutter in revolt.

 

Back then the squirming troubled Jordan a bit for the subtext it contained, but now it's so incongruous with this current, more polished, adult Annie that he has to laugh a little bit. "Annie?"

 

"We're engaged!" she blurts out, and Jordan's eyes immediately and automatically dart down to her left hand, holding onto her coffee cup, and spot the diamond-encrusted band there. "We got engaged last weekend, and we waited until today to tell his mother because I was coming out here today anyway, so Jeff took the day off of work and we're telling everybody in person."

 

"And it's my turn, is it?" Jordan asks mildly, to which he is given an exuberant nod. He laughs again and sits down across from Annie at the table. "Well, it's wonderful news. Congratulations."

 

"Thank you," says Annie before scrunching up her nose. "It feels funny, though. Accepting congratulations for getting engaged. All I did was find a ring in my sorbet and say 'yes,' and all the girls at work have been acting like I've accomplished something monumental since the minute they spotted the ring on Monday morning. I don't feel like I've done anything, really."

 

"Now, you know that's not true."

 

Annie grins sheepishly. "You know what I meant. I meant with the engagement. Although now that I think of it, there are probably plenty of women in the world who think I deserve the Congressional Medal of Honor for getting Jeff Winger to put an engagement ring in food."

 

"I do so look forward to meeting this young man," Jordan says dryly. "He helps you with such interesting additions to your ever-growing list of accomplishments. Speaking of which," he adds, checking his watch, "should we head over?"

 

Annie nods and drinks down one last sip before standing to accompany Jordan out the door. "What, you don't think that winning paintball assassin and learning to use nunchucks are enterprises worthy of my precious time?" she asks in an innocent voice with a gleam in her eye. Jordan only chuckles at her as he takes her used cup, pouring the leftover bit down the sink and dropping it into the bin with his own.

 

"You know, you can meet him today if you like," she continues conversationally as they stride down the hall. "He dropped me off so he could hang out with his mom a little longer, but he'll be here to pick me up for lunch with a bunch of our old college friends. You could come out to the car and say hi!" Annie gasps a little, like she's hit on the best idea ever conceived. "I bet he'd really like to meet you. I've told him about you."

 

Jordan agrees, half out of affection for Annie and half out of pure curiosity. This isn't the first time he's heard Jeff's name, and every tidbit he hears about Annie's boyfriend -- now fiancé -- has been compiled to form an image in Jordan's mind that contrasts sharply with the kind of partner he had expected Annie to settle down with.

 

She's telling the story of how they became engaged in more detail, including the surprise cameo by Andrew Cohen -- "Do you remember Andy? My old boyfriend? Reddish hair? Gay?" -- when Jordan notices that they're nearing the plate-glass door by the cafeteria that Annie catapulted herself through, once upon a time. He braces himself for a stumble in her words, a halt in her monologue, or even a total body freeze when she's struck by her most traumatic memory. None of them come. Her steps remain smooth and steady, and the next moment they round another corner and the door is out of sight.

 

Annie finishes her story at the entrance to the library with one more fluttering display of her left hand, and Jordan is happy to indulge her by taking her left hand in his to examine her engagement ring as if he knows a single thing about jewelry, which he doesn't. It's silver and sparkly, and he tells her that it's lovely.

 

Inside the library, Jordan's senior homeroom class is already seated in an alcove at the back, waiting for the alumnus presentation to begin and talking amongst themselves with the slight buzzing undercurrent of excitement at being excused from their fourth period classes to hear about the wide world that awaited them when they broke free of Riverside High School in several months. Annie takes a deep breath while she still stands, unnoticed, at the back of the space with Jordan, who isn't surprised that she's a little nervous.

 

"I'm not even a technically an alum!" she had maintained when Jordan had proposed the idea of her coming in to speak over coffee a couple of months previously, on her last visit from Denver. "I didn't graduate from Riverside."

 

"Irrelevant," countered Jordan, shrugging. "You went there for three and a half years, you were my student, and yours is a story I want my current students to hear."

 

It had taken another hour of cajoling and two weeks of relentless e-mail campaigning on Jordan's part, but Annie had finally agreed to it. She lets out her deep breath which, to Jordan's surprise, appears to have calmed her considerably. Annie throws her shoulders back, marches down the aisle, and spins around on her heel with impeccable balance to face the group of teenagers, once her worst fear that would have sent her into a cold sweat.

 

Now she only smiles endearingly and begins, "Hi, I'm Annie Edison, class of 2009, and I now work in health administration at Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver."

 

The students are unusually attentive -- or, at least, the boys are, and even the more overt attention-seekers among the girls soon settle into a disgruntled silence when they realize that they won't be pulling focus from the perky brunette who represents the promise of a real world and real women beyond the brick walls they presently inhabit.

 

Annie's nearly done when Jordan hears the ancient floor creak under someone's feet behind him and turns automatically towards the sound, expecting a latecomer. Instead he sees a tall man not much younger than himself approach, and Jordan frowns. It's only the third week of school, and Riverside is large, but he didn't think there were any new additions to the teaching faculty that he hadn't met. The next moment, though, he sees a visitor's pass that the man had let stick to the tip of his index finger on his left hand, apparently having delayed putting it on. Jordan searches his mind and remembers that the next alumnus talk is supposed to be from an engineer named William Sands that Jordan has never met. Sands isn't scheduled for another half hour, but maybe engineers are notoriously early for things. Jordan's contact with them has been limited. He quietly slips over to the man, keeping his voice low to keep from distracting Annie or the students from her conclusion.

 

"You must be Mr. Sands," Jordan whispers, offering his hand for a shake. "I'm afraid you're a bit early, so if you'd like I can take you down for some coffee in--"

 

"Ah, no," cuts in the tall man, also whispering, but a little more loudly. "Sorry, I'm not here for a talk. Well, not my own." He gestures with his chin towards Annie. "That's my fiancée. I'm just here to pick her up, thought I'd spy a little if that's cool."

 

"Your…" Jordan's words catch in his throat and he swallows them. "Oh." He turns back to look at Annie, who still looks so young to him -- not so very much older than the students listening to her. No longer listening, in fact, but applauding politely. She's done. She gives them a grateful smile and a little ankle-dip before moving her gaze back to where the two men are standing. Her face lights up and she hurries to them.

 

"I didn't know you were coming in!" she squeals to Jordan's new companion as the students start to gather their things, their chatter an incomprehensible background track, and she hops up on tiptoe to kiss the tall man on the cheek. He still has to bend a bit to let her reach. His hand slides around her waist easily as they both return to their normal heights. "I think it went well," Annie divulges gleefully up at him. "Mr. Harding," she adds, glowing, "this is Jeff Winger. Jeff, this is my old history teacher Mr. Harding."

 

Jeff belatedly offers his right hand back, which Jordan grasps automatically. Jeff's grip is firm and practiced. "Call me Jordan, please," Jordan says a little hollowly. After all, they must be nearly the same age.

 

"Are you all right, Mr. Harding?" questions Annie, looking concerned, and Jordan realizes he's been staring unnervingly at Jeff.

 

"Oh, god," says Jeff suddenly, dropping his hand. "We haven't met before, have we? Like, in court? I don't know if I could take it if Annie was introducing me to someone I'd once ripped apart on the witness stand. Not again."

 

"No, of course, it's a pleasure to meet you. Annie's told me plenty. You're just, um," Jordan clears his throat. "You're not quite what I imagined."

 

"Ah." Jeff turns to Annie. "You, ah, never told him."

 

"I...didn't even think of it," she protests, apparently somehow immediately on the same page as Jeff, and turns back to Jordan. "I know I told you I met him at school…I didn't think you'd assume that meant he was my age. You knew I stayed at Greendale. I mean, one of our good friends there--" Jeff clears his throat and she hastily amends with an eye roll "--okay, one of _my_ good friends there was nearly seventy when we graduated."

 

"Yes, of course," says Jordan, trying to nod. "So, you're a lawyer?" But his attempt to change the subject is for naught, as his nod feels jerky even to him and in all likelihood it looks that way too, because Annie pulls him off to the side, with a restraining hand held out to Jeff.

 

"Mr. Harding, is something wrong?"

 

"I'm just a bit surprised, Annie," Jordan tries to mollify.

 

She smiles a little. "I know, I never thought I'd end up with a lawyer either…"

 

"Not that," Jordan mumbles before he can stop himself.

 

Annie frowns, though, having heard him. "What, because of the age thing? Really?"

 

Jordan hesitates, which is as bad as a confession to Annie.

 

"It really bothers you, doesn't it?"

 

"I'm only concerned for your well-being, Annie."

 

"You're the one who told me I was an adult almost ten years ago," she says, sounding confused. "That conversation set me on my path to recovery. If I could be trusted to make my own decisions about my life then, why not now?"

 

"It's not that I don't trust you," Jordan says in a low voice, still very conscious of Jeff hovering several feet away.

 

"But I'm not asking you to trust Jeff," Annie presses.

 

"Annie, you must understand my reservations here," entreats Jordan.

 

"I do," she says, nodding. "Jeff had them too, once upon a time. I didn't like them then from him and I like them even less now from you."

 

Jordan is wishing he'd just stayed quiet until he could talk to Annie alone, rationally, and get her to understand, when Jeff steps up behind her cautiously.

 

"You know, you're not exactly what I imagined either," says Jeff, but his tone has no edge to it. He actually seems to be trying to defuse the situation. "When Annie told me about all you did for her with rehab and all that, I always pictured someone a little older, more like a father figure."

 

"I have been a father figure," Jordan snaps, looking him in the eye. "Because it's the acceptable way to act towards a young girl when you're _our age._ "

 

"Mr. Harding!" Annie gasps. Jeff looks like he wants to hit him.

 

"I'm sorry," Jordan backtracks hurriedly, glancing between the pair. "That came out wrong."

 

"No, it didn't," snarls Jeff.

 

Annie steps between the two, facing Jordan, but standing close enough to Jeff that Jordan thinks they may be touching.

 

"Mr. Harding," and her voice is shaking a little as she says this, "I'm always going to appreciate what you did for me. Honestly. I would never have gotten my life together without you. But…my life…I share it with Jeff now." Annie shakes her head slowly and her eyes start to fill -- it's still just as effective as it was when she was seventeen -- as she finishes, "I owe a lot to you, but I owe a lot to him too, and what's more, he owes a lot to me. And what I don't owe to you is any right to judge me on who I choose to spend my life with. Because you're _not_ my dad, and I _am_ an adult." She says this last part gently, but matter-of-factly, a trick Jordan has come to recognize as inherently Annie, but he suddenly suspects it might not be all her. He sneaks another look at Jeff out of the corner of his eye. He looks nettled but proud.

 

Jeff's hands land on Annie's shoulders. "We've got lunch with the group," he murmurs in her ear. She nods, blinking away her tears. As Annie starts to walk away, Jeff is reaching into his pocket. "I'll be right behind you."

 

"Jeff--"

 

He turns to look at her. "Annie, I'll be right there."

 

Annie disappears into the main part of the library without another word.

 

Jordan's entire body stiffens. He wonders if Jeff would hit him in a high school library. He wonders if being with Jeff for so long has turned Annie into the kind of girl who would leave her tall, intimidating, angry boyfriend alone with her former mentor to beat him up. Jeff's hand comes out of his pocket.

 

He's holding out a business card. Jeff's business card. Jordan takes it, numbly.

 

"It took me about two years to get past the age thing. If it take you less time than that, you can give me a call and I'll talk to Annie for you."

 

Jordan looks up from the card. He doesn't ask the question, but Jeff answers anyway.

 

"She likes you. You're important to her. You were there for her, and you helped her, and that means something." Jeff turns on his heel, much like Annie did just before beginning her speech to the students, and starts to follow after her. Just before he vanishes behind the same corner as his fiancée, though, he turns back. "But if you try and get back in touch with her without talking to me first, you'll probably get punched in the nose. If not by me, then definitely by her." He shrugs. "Just giving you a fair warning, because I can tell you from experience, that girl will hit you like a Winnebago."

 

Plucking off the visitor's pass that had still been stuck to his finger, Jeff crumples it and drops it on the floor before leaving Jordan standing alone in the alcove.


	5. Colby Grayson, pt I

Colby Grayson's first impression of Annie Edison was that the girl had absolutely no need to be on uppers. In fact, it probably would have been a good idea for her to give downers a try. The girl needed to be mellowed out. Within the first few days of encountering Annie, Colby was convinced that if he had met her in the real world, he would have wasted no time in offering to share some of his Valium. But as it is, Colby didn't meet Annie in the outside world. He met her in rehab.

 

From what he could figure out in the first week, Annie had arrived not that long before Colby had nearly killed himself and the guy from the DMV as he took his driving test on his sixteenth birthday and was promptly hustled off to Arapahoe House amid a cloud of secrecy and shame. Rumor had it that Annie's own inciting incident had involved hurling herself through a window of her high school and that her parents had kicked her out before she ended up at Arapahoe. These were all only rumors, of course, because at that point Annie hadn't confided in anyone besides, presumably, her individual therapist, and all the other kids had to go on were the lingering scars from cuts on her arms and the fact that Annie had not yet had a single family therapy session.

 

She had a roommate, Jill, who said that Annie spent all of her free time studying for her GED so she could start community college in the fall and transfer to a real school as soon as possible. Jill swore this information had come directly from Annie herself, and it seemed legitimate to all of the other kids, excepting the fact that not one of them had ever had a single conversation with Annie that was long enough to divulge that amount of material. She rarely spoke yet in group therapy, apparently preferring to listen. Someone told Colby that on Annie's first day she had asked if she could take notes in group and was told no, so instead Colby watched as Annie sat on her hands through most of every session as if she didn't know what to do with them otherwise.

 

Of course, after some time in which she slowly started to feel like her normal self again, Annie started sharing diligently in every group session, clearly determined to put in the work that had been deemed necessary to beat her Adderall addiction. A month later, Colby know all kinds of things about Annie from group. He knew about the pressures from her mother, and how she felt abandoned by her father, and about how her boyfriend had dumped her, and all the factors that she felt could possibly have anything to do with her severe addiction to Adderall and her subsequent nervous breakdown (about which the rumors were remarkably close to accurate). But Colby could still count the number of things he had learned about her outside of group on one hand. In fact, he could count them on two fingers. He knew exactly two things about Annie Edison that didn't come from group, and the first was that Annie picked at her split ends.

 

Annie liked to sit by the window in the common room, away from where everyone else would gather to play games or socialize during their group recreation time. Colby had never seen her actually look out the window, so he could only assume she was there for the light it provided, so she could methodically examine each individual hair and, if necessary, pick or peel away the damage she found there. These damaged pieces were deposited neatly in a trash can next to Annie's favorite chair, so that when she got up from her lodging place for dinner, there were no telltale chestnut hairs to betray the fact that she had ever been there.

 

The other thing Colby knew about Annie that he didn't learn in group was that he was completely in love with her. He had racked his brain for the reasons why and had found none. If asked to describe a girl who would epitomize Colby's type, he would say she was blonde and slim, laid-back…the kind of girl that would wear black and draw things on her arms and read comics and ditch a class with him every once in a while, just to hang out in the back of the auditorium where the doors were broken. She certainly wouldn't be a slightly hefty brunette with enough split ends to keep her occupied with them for weeks on end, self-esteem issues stemming from a desperate need to be perfect, and an addiction to _study aids,_ of all the drugs to choose.

 

The only thing that was right was the eyes. Blue eyes would be the first feature in Colby's description. Every time he got close enough to Annie to take a good look at her eyes, he saved up the image in his mind for later, because he never knew when the next time she'd be near enough would be.

 

Every time Colby had decided his feelings for Annie were no more than some withdrawal-inspired, rehab-only crush, she would do something that he found thoroughly and inexplicably adorable. The first time he heard her sneeze, she sounded like a plush toy with a squeaker in it that Colby had often used to keep his toddler-aged half-brother occupied while he was supposed to be watching him. He wanted to squeeze Annie to see if she was as soft and if she would make that same noise again. One day they had pizza for lunch, and Colby realized that Annie ate her pizza with a knife and fork. The kind of behavior that would have seemed fussy and annoying on any other girl were somehow part of this girl's infuriating charms.

 

Of course, aside from being two years older, a striking anomaly on Colby's list of love interests, and notably socially withdrawn almost to the point of misanthropy whenever they weren't in group, Annie was also a fellow rehab patient. So Colby kept himself in check by reminding himself that in less than ninety days, they would both be gone and Arapahoe House would be nothing but a memory.

 

However, one day as Colby was telling himself this after seeing Annie fall asleep on her usual chair, curled like a cat and making little sighing noises as she shifted, he realized that his own ninety days were nearly up. So close to over, in fact, that Annie should have been gone by now…unless she and her individual therapist had made the decision that her stay needed to be extended. With that thought gnawing away at his mind, he promptly lost the game of checkers he was playing, as well as the next three before his partner absconded with a complaint that beating Colby was too easy.

 

Luckily, Colby was given less than a day to wonder about this. The next day in group, Annie shared, as usual, but she didn't talk about her past.

 

"My high school graduation is this weekend," she said, staring at the floor in the middle of the circle of chairs. "And not only am I not going to be valedictorian, I'm not even going to be there. Because I dropped out. And I do think that dropping out was the right choice," she added quickly, looking up at the counselor for such a short amount of time that Colby wasn't even sure if she caught the reassuring nod the counselor gave her in return. "But it's…it's so easy to see that in here. That it was the right choice. When I get back out into the world, I won't be, you know…a young adult who made certain choices to…facilitate her own recovery. I'll be a high school drop-out. That's what people will see when I try to find an apartment, or get into a school, or get a job. _I'll_ be the high school drop-out and the kids who sailed by with C's in all their classes, they'll be graduates."

 

Annie rubbed at a scuff on the wooden floor with the toe of her shoe. "I wonder if I'll even be in the yearbook," she mused quietly.

 

She didn't mention her failure to leave Arapahoe, but Colby was pretty sure he understood it now. As he looked around the circle, he was pretty sure all of the other kids understood.

 

To a point.

 

"God," whispered Lenny from across the dinner table that night, looking at Annie picking glumly at her food out of the corner of his eye. "I mean, it sucks and all, but it's just a high school graduation. She's already got her GED, right?"

 

"Come on, Lenny," said Gia fairly. "You know Annie. All she wants is to succeed. That's why she ended up here. Because she wanted it so bad."

 

Colby stabbed his chicken with his fork. "That's not totally true." Gia and Lenny looked at him and he elaborates. "Success? That's not all she wants. She wants to be accepted, you guys. Just look at her. It's obvious." It occurred to Colby as he was saying this that he himself had only come across this revelation that afternoon, but now it seemed so glaring that he couldn't understand how he and everyone else had missed it.

 

Lenny snorted. "Annie? Please. That girl has never said a word to anyone outside of group that didn't involve asking them to move out of her light so she could study."

 

But Gia's face had a look of dawning comprehension. "No, you know what? I think Colby's right."

 

"You two are mental," proclaimed Lenny, popping a cherry tomato from his salad into his mouth.

 

"Lenny, look at her," asserted Gia. "On a scale of one to Urkel, how unpopular do you think she was in high school?"

 

Over at her table, Annie had switched from picking at her food to picking at a spot on her face until she caught herself at it and determinedly picked up her fork again.

 

Lenny only shrugged, but Colby could tell he saw Gia's point. "Okay guys," Colby said, "I have an idea, and it's gonna sound really corny, but bear with me…"

 

The next afternoon, as they were all leaving group, Gia took Annie by the arm. "You are not going over to that chair today," Gia said firmly.

 

"I'm not?" asked Annie. There was shock in her voice, but definite intrigue.

 

"Nope," said Colby from her other side. Annie twisted to look at him and he got his best look at her eyes yet. "We're all doing something. Come on."

 

When they reached the common room, Colby saw that the staff had made good on their promise to set up an array of chairs all facing one direction, so they could have the illusion of a stage. Gia firmly directed Annie to a seat in the center of the front row, and she and Colby sat down on either side of her. The rest of the kids, having been briefed on what was about to come through whispers and notes over the previous twenty hours, filled the rest of the seats and sat in wait. Lenny walked into the empty space in front of the chairs and called for attention. (It had been remarkably easy to get Lenny on board with Colby's plan when Gia had suggested Lenny serve as master of ceremonies.)

 

"Ladies and gentlemen of Arapahoe," Lenny said in his grandest voice, which wasn't especially grand because it was still in the end stages of changing, "I would like to welcome you all to the House's first Senior Superlative awards ceremony!"

 

Colby was sitting too far from Annie to actually be able to physically feel her stiffen, but he could swear the air between them seemed suddenly thicker.

 

"Now, since our time here is a little more condensed than high school," Lenny continued, "we're gonna be defining seniors as people expecting to leave here in the next three weeks. And this is our chance to honor them for their," he cleared his throat, " _unique_ gifts. First up, I would like to present the award for 'Most Artistic.'" He pulled an index card from his back pocket and mimed opening an envelope as if there was one around it. "And the winner is…" Lenny trailed off and looked at them expectantly.

 

Colby, at a loss, looked across Annie, who was indeed sitting very stiffly, to Gia. Gia rolled her eyes at Lenny and started to slap her hands on her thighs rapidly to make a drumroll noise. Colby joined her and the rest of the kids, minus Annie, caught on quickly.

 

Lenny, looking satisfied, announced, "The winner is…Ryan Singer! Come on up here, Ryan!"

 

A grinning blond kid of about seventeen approached the "stage", the necklace of bottle caps around his neck clanking as he walked. Lenny handed him a piece of paper upon which his superlative had been handwritten and clapped him on the back, causing the loudest clank yet. "Congratulations, Ryan!"

 

Colby heard a noise from Annie next to him, one he was unfamiliar with -- and he had catalogued all the noises he had ever heard from her in the last several weeks. He sneaked another peek at her to see what was happening.

 

It was a giggle.

 

Colby looked back at Lenny with a discreet wink. Lenny looked satisfied. "Next up," he rumbled, "the award for Craziest Driver!"

 

Colby rolled his eyes at the title that Lenny had insisted on bestowing upon him…but Annie was having fun. And that was all that mattered right now.

 

It was only three short presentations later that Lenny reported they were about to put forth their last award. "This award will be going to the resident voted 'Most Likely to Succeed.' One more drumroll, please?"

 

The kids complied.

 

"Well, what do you know. Annie Edison!" Lenny cried.

 

Annie leapt up from her chair with an unprecedented amount of energy. She was already practically on top of Lenny, and so just had to turn to face the audience as they applauded enthusiastically. Her face was shining happily. "Thank you, guys!" She turned to Lenny and said again, emphatically, "Thank you."

 

Lenny shrugged, though he looked proud. "It was nothing," he mumbled. "It was Colby's idea."

 

Annie switched her focus and her smile to Colby, who noticed that though her face was still chubby and spotted, her teeth were white and straight. If her smile could be removed from the rest of her face it could belong to a movie star. She took the step that closed the distance between him, beaming with gratitude, and bent down to give him a hug. When Colby hugged her back, he found that she was indeed very soft, though she didn't squeak. She did smell nice, but her hair tickled his nose. Annie rubbed a tiny circle on his back, just under his shoulder blade, before she loosened her grip and backed away.

 

That night after dinner Colby was reading a comic in the common room. He could have done it in his room, he supposed, but he had been given a new roommate with whom he didn't quite click, and since he was leaving soon anyway it didn't quite seem worth it to try and bond.

 

"Hey Marie?" Colby heard a soft voice coming from near the staff desk. He turned to see Annie there. "Do you think, um…" she bit her lip. "Would you be able to cut my hair for me?"

 

Marie was the most matronly, comfortable woman on the staff. Colby wasn't surprised that Annie had sought her out for assistance, nor by the fact that Marie agreed readily and escorted Annie to the bathroom, scissors in hand. Half an hour later the two women emerged, one of them minus several inches of hair. Annie's hair was now nearly a bob, falling somewhere between her chin and her shoulders. Colby wasn't sure if it made her look older, but it did make her look different. Ready, maybe.

 

Annie caught Colby looking at her, and he cursed himself. Usually he was better at looking away at just the right time. But now he couldn't bring himself to pretend he hadn't been watching her, and she smiled and approached him shyly, pulling at the ends as if she could make them grow right back out. "What do you think?"

 

"Yeah," managed Colby, "it's good. Really, good."

 

"Thanks!"

 

Annie flounced back to her room. Colby had never seen her flounce before. But something about the sight seemed very right.

 

The Annie that walked around Arapahoe for the next several days was almost unrecognizable from the Annie that had been haunting the corner of the common room in the previous weeks. She talked to people, she smiled, and she even doled out some more hugs -- Colby would have never guessed, both from her past behavior and from her descriptions of her parents, that Annie was this affectionate. She accepted the compliments on her new hair self-consciously, her cheeks turning pink as she ran her hand over the unfamiliar shortness.

 

Annie left Arapahoe a week after the superlative ceremony. Her new roommate after Jill told Colby that she had seen Annie tuck the handwritten certificate that denoted her as "Most Likely to Succeed" carefully into the front pocket of her suitcase. They all gathered around to wish her well, and Colby couldn't help thinking about how it would be his own turn for this farewell tradition in several short days. She hugged every one of them, and though it might have been his own hopeful imagination, Colby rather thought she hugged him just a little bit longer than anyone else. Annie turned to face the group of kids, framed by the doorway.

 

"We'll all keep in touch, right?" Her huge blue eyes shone at them all happily. "I still have to get a new cell phone, but I left my e-mail address with Marie."

 

All the kids agreed readily. Colby expected Annie to linger, to be unwilling to leave the friends she had only just made and a place where she felt accepted maybe for the first time.

 

Instead, Annie turned and practically flew out the door, her suitcase not seeming to weigh her down at all. The kids dispersed, Colby only a step or two behind them, reflecting upon the sight of the love of his life disappearing without a look back.

 

The next week, Colby left Arapahoe and went back to his parents. He didn't e-mail Annie.


	6. Colby Grayson, pt II

"Seriously, dude, you have to see this!" An excited voice floats into Colby's comic book shop.

 

"It's pretty cool," comes a much less excited-sounding voice, and Colby now knows who will be coming into sight through the door he's left open to let in the crisp, early fall air. Troy and Abed, two of his most dedicated customers and more, are dragging in a tall, older guy that Colby doesn't think he's met before, but looks eerily familiar.

 

Troy and Abed smile at him. "Hey, Colby!"

 

"How's it going, guys?" Colby grins back.

 

Troy's practically vibrating with excitement. "This is our buddy Jeff." (The tall man raises his hand in silent greeting, his mouth a tight line.) "We want to show him."

 

Colby chortles. "Yeah, of course." He gestures unnecessarily towards the rack right next to his counter, the rack of independently drawn comics by local artists that Troy and Abed often stand near just to stare at it for inordinate amounts of time. They each grab one of Jeff's long arms and pull him over to face the rack, gesturing with identical flourishes.

 

"Ta-da!" sings Troy proudly.

 

Jeff is nonplussed. "It's a bunch of comic books. That I've never even heard of."

 

"Second row down, fourth from the left," Abed instructs.

 

Jeff rolls his eyes before directing them to the comic that Abed has specified and reading aloud, " _Kickpuncher:_ the co-mic…" he trails off.

 

"Written by Troy Barnes and Abed Nadir," Troy recites.

 

"Drawn by Jim Mahfood," adds Abed.

 

Jeff raises his eyebrows. "Please tell me this isn't another excuse to draw Annie and Britta making out in their underwear. Not that I didn't enjoy it the first time, but if they find out…" He actually looks a little nervous.

 

"No, man," whines Troy. "Britta's seen it. This one's a real comic book. It's for _sale_ here."

 

Jeff looks up at Colby, who's been watching them in amusement, with his eyebrows still raised. "Do people actually buy this?"

 

Colby nods. "I've sold about fifty copies."

 

"And only thirty-five of those were to us," Abed declares.

 

Jeff's gaze is wandering over the rest of the rack. "Is that Pierce as a superhero?"

 

Abed nods. "He hired someone to draw it a few years ago. That's what gave us our idea. You're in it, you know. See? Right there."

 

Colby snaps his fingers, startling Jeff. "That's where I know you from! You're Homo-tron!" Jeff shoots a murderous look at Colby and Colby mutters, "Sorry," but can't wipe the smile completely from his face. "Your forehead's much smaller in person," he tries.

 

Jeff lets out a tense breath and steps towards Colby, pulling out his wallet. "I'll buy every copy you have and pay you double not to restock."

 

"Sold," says Colby delightedly. "Hey, for an extra ten you can borrow my lighter and the trash can out in the alley."

 

"Done."

 

"Jee-eeeeff," says Troy beseechingly. He starts to flutter his eyelids and contort his mouth. It looks vaguely like he's having a stroke.

 

Jeff turns back to Colby with a disturbed look. "And a copy of _Kickpuncher,_ " he adds grudgingly, then calls over his shoulder, "if Troy promises to never try to make that face again!"

 

"Deal!" says Troy, and turns to Abed for their special handshake before they go deeper into the store to check out the new offerings. Colby can hear Troy's voice as the two retreat, "How come it works when Annie does it?"

 

Colby's ringing Jeff up when Jeff asks, in a low voice, "Have fifteen other people really bought their comic book?"

 

"Ten," Colby confesses. "Jim bought five."

 

Jeff screws up his face. "Is it any good?"

 

Colby cranes his neck to see if Troy and Abed can hear him. "It's pretty funny, you know, in the good way," he says fairly. "It's no Spider-Man, but if they're your friends, it's worth a read."

 

"You like Spider-Man?" Jeff regards Colby.

 

"Best superhero ever, man."

 

Jeff smiles for the first time. "A man after my own heart."

 

The payment complete, Colby plunks a stack of copies of _Pierce Hawthorne: Wiping Up Evil_ on the counter in front of Jeff. "You gonna read it first?"

 

"You mentioned a lighter?"

 

Colby reaches into his pocket and hands his Zippo to Jeff, who flicks it open expertly.

 

"Nice," he says. "Thanks."

 

But before Jeff can pick up his new purchases and take them out the back door for a bonfire, Colby hears, from the doorway, a voice very much like one he hasn't heard in years and hasn't thought about in quite some time either. "Guys, can I have my fiancé back now?"

 

Jeff grins towards the door. "You just love saying that word."

 

"Don't pretend you're not saying it to yourself every chance you get to be alone," counters the pretty brunette walking towards him. "Our bathroom door isn't as thick as you think it is."

 

"That's because I'm trying to learn to say it without laughing so you won't hit me," Jeff protests, but he looks caught.

 

"Mm-hmm," hums the woman knowingly. They kiss.

 

"Colby!" Troy exclaims from behind them. He and Abed have emerged from the shelves, holding life-sized cardboard cut-outs of Spider-Man and Batman. "We should totally get these made for our comic!"

 

"Of who, yourselves? That's not creepy or something that Pierce would do at _all,_ " Jeff says scornfully, but the young woman at his side is looking at Colby like she's seen a ghost.

 

"Colby?" she says wonderingly. Her eyes are wide and a familiar sparkling, clear blue, and suddenly Colby realizes why her voice sounded so familiar. And maybe he's psychic, or was when he was younger and on drugs, because if this is the butterfly that came out of the acne-riddled chrysalis Colby once knew as Annie Edison, his brief unrequited love for her suddenly makes a lot of sense.

 

"Whoa, Annie!" he says in delight. "You look great! How the hell are you?"

 

"I'm good," she responds, sounding stunned. "How are you?"

 

"I'm awesome!"

 

Abed's voice cuts in. "You two know each other? How?"

 

"Oh good," Jeff groans, "more of this." Annie's gaze darts sideways towards him and her expression softens.

 

"What's with you?" Troy asks him, but it's Annie who answers.

 

"Jeff met Mr. Harding today. It…didn't go so well." She puts a hand on Jeff's back and rubs little circles on it. Colby remembers when she used to do that while she was hugging him.

 

"Can we get back on topic?" Abed interrupts. "How do Annie and Colby know each other?"

 

Annie looks at Colby, apparently at some kind of a loss for words, so Colby answers for her. "Arapahoe House."

 

Jeff looks at him sharply. "Wait, rehab?"

 

" _Nice,_ " breathes Abed.

 

A cold panic washes over Colby. "Oh, god." He looks at Annie. "Did they not know?"

 

"No! I mean, yes! " exclaims Annie. "I mean…they knew, they've always known. God, _Colby._ I can't believe it's you. And you work here? And you know Troy and Abed?"

 

"Actually I own the place," says Colby as modestly as he can, but Annie still squeals.

 

"Oh my god, Colby!" She bounces a little and Jeff puts a hand to the ear nearest her, wincing. "That's great! Good for you!"

 

"Man, it's really good to see you," Colby says, and he's a little surprised by how much he means it. "I should have e-mailed you forever ago."

 

Annie shrugs and doesn't look angry, but she doesn't tell him she understands or try to rationalize his neglect for him, which makes Colby suspect that nine years and a bit has dulled the pain of what was back then probably a crushing blow.

 

"So did you say you two are getting married?" Colby looks between Jeff and Annie.

 

"Wait, who's Mr. Harding?" Troy looks confused, clearly having been trying to place the name in his mind since Annie mentioned it.

 

Annie rolls her eyes and it's so much like the very different-looking Annie that Colby got to know the week before she disappeared from his life that he wants to leap across the counter and squeeze her. "Our history teacher, Troy. He got me into rehab, remember?"

 

Troy still doesn't look totally clear. "The dude with the mole?"

 

"No, that was our algebra teacher! Mr. Harding was younger--"

 

"I'll say," mutters Jeff. Annie shoots him a look that Colby can't read.

 

"What happened?" Abed wants to know.

 

"It was nothing," Annie demurs, but Jeff isn't having it.

 

"You want to know what happened, Abed?" he says rhetorically with his eyes on Annie.

 

Abed answers anyway. "Yes."

 

Jeff doesn't pause or look away from Annie. "Annie's _favorite teacher,_ the guy I've been hearing about for the last six freaking years, essentially called me a deviant upon meeting me because I'm a little too close to his own age for the guy's comfort."

 

Abed looks uncomfortable. "Oh."

 

"We handled it, guys, it wasn't that big of a deal," Annie tries again, but Jeff is on a roll. Colby suspects from the quickly built momentum that this has been coming for a while now, and that Jeff's own distorted image staring evilly back at him from the cover of the comic books on the counter between them isn't helping to pacify him.

 

"Annie, when are you going to learn that just because you keep acting like it's not a big deal doesn't mean everyone else is going to act that way? I can't be the only one getting a little tired of being judged by everyone you ever knew before you started at Greendale."

 

"It was one teacher!" Annie cries.

 

"I haven't even gotten to that Andy guy at the restaurant--"

 

" _Who?_ " demands Troy.

 

"My ex-boyfriend, Troy!" Annie says in exasperation. "He was there the night Jeff proposed. We just told you this story at lunch."

 

"Wait," Colby breaks in, "the ex-boyfriend from high school? That guy?"

 

Annie nods and Jeff challenges, "How do you know about him?"

 

"Colby and I were in _rehab_ together, Jeff," Annie reminds him. "We had group therapy together. There was a time when we knew a lot about each other."

 

Jeff's addressing Colby again and he doesn't look happy. "How much?"

 

Colby laughs, then realizes this is the wrong choice when Jeff's eyes grow harder, and he corrects, "No, not like that! I was only sixteen and I was still half messed-up, man."

 

"Not to mention I had acne and that horrible hair--"

 

"It wasn't so bad!"

 

"My point," Jeff grits out, "about a thousand years ago, was that the ex-boyfriend may not have said anything, but he was thinking along the same lines as that Harding guy."

 

Annie folds her arms. "How could you possibly know that, Jeff? He was perfectly nice to you!"

 

"Annie--" Jeff starts loudly before appearing to remember that they were in the company of three other people, one of whom Jeff doesn't know very well. But Annie's looking at him expectantly, so he tries to calm down and speak rationally, which Colby can already tell is the wrong tack to take and probably won't last long. "Listen. You're the younger one here, so you don't notice as much, because you're not the one getting the looks."

 

"What looks?"

 

"The looks that say I'm some perverted old man taking advantage of the wide-eyed twenty-something!"

 

"I'm not wide-eyed," says Annie, stung.

 

"You are," says Abed helpfully. "If we're talking literally."

 

Annie continues without acknowledging this. "And you think I don't get looks from your buddies at the firm? They look at me like I'm some gold-digging hussy like all of _their_ girlfriends! That guy Kyle's girlfriend keeps trying to get me to tell her where I got my boob job!"

 

"Oh yeah," Jeff says scathingly. "Life is so hard when you'll always be known as the young, pretty one in the relationship and have every guy you've ever met leaping to defend you from the predator who's just trying to get you in the sack, completely omitting the fact that we've been together for over six years, so I'm the one who's had plenty of time to realize how _absolutely insane_ you are."

 

Annie doesn't seem to have a response to this yet, so Jeff turns back to Colby, both his hands on the counter and his back hunched over a little, so he does indeed look like a predator preparing to strike at this moment (and a little bit like Homo-tron). There's fire in his eyes. "So Colby," Jeff spits out, "why don't you tell us _exactly_ what your opinion of Annie's engagement to me is? Please, don't hold back!"

 

There are perhaps ten seconds of silence, in which Colby glances around at the four gathered in his shop. Troy is hiding behind the Spider-Man cut-out with only the top half of his face and his fingers gripping around Spider-Man's biceps visible. His eyes are darting back and forth between Annie and he looks stiff with fright. Abed is also frozen, mostly expressionless, but with his head tilted to a degree that Colby has come to recognize as a sign that he is extremely interested in the proceedings. He's got his arm around the Batman cut-out like the two are old friends. Jeff is still in his same position, and Annie is watching Jeff, her arms still folded and her expression wounded but defiant.

 

"I think it's cool," says Colby. Annie jerks her head to look at him.

 

"What?" rasps Jeff, not believing him.

 

Colby shrugs. "I don't give a damn how old you are. All I care about is that you like Spider-Man, and Annie likes you. Right now I do think maybe you've got some rage issues, but Annie doesn't seem to mind, and she's cool. I trust her," he finishes simply.

 

Jeff's looking at him like he doesn't know what to make of him. The look on Annie's face, however…Colby hasn't been the recipient of this much grateful adoration since the day Annie was given her award at Arapahoe. He takes a moment to memorize her face and save up the sight for a rainy day.

 

Then Colby adds, remembering their presence, "And if you're a friend of Troy and Abed's you've got to be all right."

 

" _Huzzah,_ " Troy whispers shakily from behind Spider-Man.

 

Annie moves around the counter to give Colby a tight, heartfelt hug, which he returns. Just before they break apart, one of her hands rubs a tiny circle on his back, just like he remembers. When they're done, she walks another neat path around the counter back to Jeff and smacks him on the chest, hard.

 

"Sorry," he mumbles.

 

Annie raises an eyebrow.

 

Jeff groans and turns to Colby. "Sorry, man."

 

Colby only shrugs. "Yeah."

 

Jeff turns back to Annie, who looks marginally satisfied, which Jeff seems to take as permission to kiss her. From the way she responds, it appears that actually is how she intended it.

 

Behind them, Troy is finally emerging from behind his cardboard shield. Abed looks even more satisfied than Annie.

 

"I was waiting for that," he says to Troy, "but I didn't think we'd actually get to see it. Cool."

 

"You couldn't have warned me?" hisses Troy back, still looking at Jeff and Annie warily as if he's afraid they're about to become a four-armed, two-headed monster that will attack at any given moment.

 

The two break apart, though, and Jeff looks at Colby. "So…is this a bad time to ask where that trash can is?" He holds up Colby's Zippo, still clutched in his hand.

 

Annie narrows her eyes and says, "What now?" Jeff wordlessly holds up the copy of Pierce's comic book at the top of the stack. Her face clears, though the corners of her mouth are twitching. "Fine. But I'm coming with you. After last time, there is no way I'm trusting you alone with fire."

 

"Well, I still don't trust you with chloroform, so I guess we're even," breezes Jeff, and he picks up the stack of comic books and heads toward the back of the store after a gesture from Colby.

 

Annie hangs back for a minute to stifle her giggles. "Oh my god," she says quietly to Colby, eyes shining with mirth. "Please tell me those aren't the only copies."

 

Colby scoffs and grins. "They were, but I took one off the stack for you while you guys were making out." He flashes her the cover and she bounces on the soles of her feet a little in glee. Annie rolls the comic carefully and slips it into her purse before the two start to follow Jeff, Troy, and Abed to the back entrance to the alley. "So…" Colby speculates out loud, "chloroform?"


	7. Bryan Edison, pt I

Annie was an intense child. She had been one as far back as Bryan Edison could remember.

 

Sometimes early on, when he was alone in his new one-bedroom apartment in Denver, he wondered whether things with his marriage could have been different if she hadn't been so intense. If she'd been an easygoing, naturally affectionate child like Bryan always imagined he'd have. If she could have maybe rubbed off on her mother, rubbed off on _him._

 

Those were the worst nights, soon after the divorce, when he caught himself dangerously close to blaming his twelve-year-old daughter for the dissolution of his marriage. And the next day he always went out and bought Annie something, something he thought she'd like. A new handsome leather-bound dictionary, a sturdy backpack, a set of pens in every color. As Bryan adjusted to his new life in the city of Denver, though, the worst nights came less and less often, until there was no need for him to send her guilt-induced gifts anymore. Without the gifts, Bryan found fewer reasons to make the trip from Denver to Greendale to see Annie, and so their visits became phone conversations, which grew more and more infrequent.

 

So by the time Annie's high school graduation rolled around, Bryan hadn't seen his daughter in nearly three years, hadn't talked to her in half that time, and figured, miserably, while trying to figure out just how he had let the situation slip so far, that he was just this side of "estranged." And there was no way to clinch your status as an absent parent quite like missing your only child's high school graduation.

 

He arrived at the Riverside football field with his invitation to the ceremony clutched in his hand, the one he had received way back in December when they had been sent to the out-of-town relatives by the school. (That was what he had become. His daughter's out-of-town relative.) He kept his eyes out for his ex-wife, not sure if he was looking to sit near her or as far away from her as he could. It didn't matter. He didn't see her.

 

Bryan took a seat near the back, scanning the students as they filed in, jostling and poking each other with the giddiness of near-freedom, but was too far back to make out his daughter's face. He saw maybe half a dozen stocky brunettes that he thought could have been her, but supposed he would have to wait until they were all crossing the stage to be sure. There were a few faces that seemed vaguely familiar: old classmates of Annie's, Bryan supposed, whose features had remained in the back of his mind despite years of absence, but none of them were Annie.

 

The ceremony was fairly standard and dull in reality, as most high school graduations tend to be -- it was only the excitement of it being _their_ ceremony that kept the graduates at all engaged. There were addresses from the principal and the superintendent, then the valedictorian -- apparently Annie had not quite managed to secure that position, and Bryan felt a wave of vicarious disappointment for his overachieving daughter. The valedictorian was a shy girl named Maura who delivered the usual kind of speech. Bryan was as sure she had slaved over it for hours as he was that none of her classmates would remember a word she had said a week from now.

 

The graduates were quiet but restless until halfway through her speech when Maura, with a sly and terrified edge to her tone, punctuated a statement with, "After all, despite popular belief, we're not robots." The sea of students in caps and gowns giggled appreciatively, as did a sizable population of the family members surrounding Bryan, and Maura paused, clearly not used to this kind of validation from her peers. She plowed on through the rest of her speech more bravely, ending with a triumphant cry, "So take a lesson from someone we all know and don't be afraid to plow right through that plate-glass door into the world!" The laughter was bigger this time, and was followed by raucous applause and cheers for Maura, who flounced happily back to her chair amid hearty claps on the back.

 

After the choir jostled their way on and off the stage for a performance of "Bridge Over Troubled Water," the procession of students finally came. The students graduating summa cum laude paraded proudly across the stage first, but Annie wasn't there. The last names went right from Delaney to Evans, with no Edison in between. The same thing happened with Edgecomb and Eggers when the general student population took its turn. Bryan, with a feeling of dread rising in his throat like bile, wondered if maybe both his ex-wife and his daughter had started using Pincus, his ex's maiden name, but no, the names went right from Picetti to Plimpton. And then the ceremony was over, and Bryan had not seen his daughter or heard the words "Annie Edison" spoken once.

 

Bryan remained in his chair as those around him were quickly vacated, their previous occupants in a rush to find their graduates in the confusion of identical caps and gowns and snap some pictures before the recently released teenagers were able to escape. The seats around him were completely empty by the time Bryan managed to stand and start moving towards his car. Once he was in it, however, it seemed like the blink of an eye and he was driving down the street on which his old house sat. He nearly collided with some guy in a Smart car, actually wearing driving goggles, as the other driver swerved to screech into the community college's parking lot, but Bryan soon found himself safely in his old driveway.

 

He walked up to the front door cautiously, not sure what to expect. The most likely answer was that they had moved, whether just to a different school district or much farther away. Or maybe Annie had transferred to a private school, one with good college prep, and the invitation to graduation had been sent to him through some administrative error that still left her on Riverside's books. He rang the doorbell.

 

Ellen let out a bark of laughter when she saw him through the screen door. She was in that same silk bathrobe she always used to wear and was clutching a tumbler of orange juice that Bryan suspected was not only orange juice. She didn't open the screen door, only eyed him through it as she clenched out, "Of course."

 

"Hi, Ellie," Bryan said bravely. Now that he was here, there was no point in being sheepish, and Ellen didn't seem to be in the mood to sift through his apologies.

 

He was proved right when Ellen simply asked, "What do you want?" before taking a sip from her glass.

 

"Where's Annie?"

 

Ellen's knuckles went white where she gripped the door frame tightly. Her voice was even tighter when she said, her voice dripping with bitterness, "Annie's not here."

 

"Where is she?" Bryan persisted. "Today's her high school graduation and she wasn't there."

 

"Oh," Ellen laughed again, hollowly. "I know today's her high school's graduation. And I knew she wouldn't be there. What I didn't know was that you were going to be there. You should have called. I could have saved you a trip."

 

"Ellen," Bryan said with what he considered to be a heroic amount of politeness and patience, "neither of us wants to be having this conversation. So will you please just tell me where my daughter is?"

 

"I see, _now_ she's your daughter?" Ellen retorted acidly. "Fine, then. The last I heard, _your_ daughter, Dr. Edison, was at Arapahoe House, and had been there ever since she took so many drugs that she decided it would be a good idea to go through a glass door without opening it."

 

"Drugs?" Bryan stood in shock for a moment, the memory of an entire class of high school graduates laughing echoing in his ears, before he registered how she had begun that particular piece of news. "What do you mean, the last you heard?"

 

"She might be out now." Ellen waved the hand holding her drink and a little bit sloshed onto her bathrobe. She didn't acknowledge the spill. "It's been a few months since she went."

 

"And…" Bryan marveled, flabbergasted. "And you haven't been to visit her? You haven't even spoken to her?"

 

It was clearly the wrong approach because the temperature of Ellen's voice, already hovering slightly below freezing, dropped to subzero. "She made it perfectly clear when she left that she was an adult who would be making her own decisions without regard for my opinions. If she wants to be an adult, let her," Ellen spat and slammed the main door in Bryan's face.

 

Bryan couldn't move for at least a minute. He thought he may have heard crying on the other side of the wooden barrier, but it wasn't until he definitely heard something glass break inside that he was jarred into movement. He hurried to his car, not sure where to go but wanting to get away from this house as quickly as possible. He found himself in the auxiliary parking lot of GCC, mostly emptied for the weekend, looking up the number for Arapahoe House on his phone.

 

After staring at the number on his phone screen in agony for several long minutes, Bryan pressed the 'send' button and brought the phone heavily to his ear. He was greeted by a recording telling him that the phone lines were open Monday through Saturday from eight in the morning to seven at night, but that he could leave a message by pressing 3. Bryan wasn't even aware he had followed the robotic voice's instructions until he heard a beep and found himself talking.

 

"Hello." His voice was raspy; he took a pause to clear his throat. "Hi. My name is Bryan Edison…my daughter Annie Edison is in residential care at your facility…or was…I'm not really sure. I…my ex-wife just now…I only just discovered that Annie was even…" Bryan shook his head to clear it. He was an adult. He was a parent, absent or not. He had a Ph.D. He could handle one phone message. "I was hoping someone could give me some answers as to whether my daughter Annie is still in residence, and if so, if I might come to see her. I can be reached on my cell phone at any time." Bryan left the number, and before he hung up, he thought he might have whispered the word "please" into the mouthpiece. He dropped the phone onto the passenger seat and started his car again for the drive back to Denver.

 

He was in the laboratory the next morning when his cell phone vibrated on the counter less than an arm's length from him, the caller ID identifying a number from Thornton. Thanking heaven that he wasn't in the middle of working with chemicals but was instead puzzling out an equation on the glass cabinet doors he often used as a makeshift workspace, Bryan threw down the dry erase marker he was using without bothering to put the cap on and nearly hit himself in the head in his enthusiasm to get the buzzing phone to his ear. "Annie?"

 

"Uh…" It was a male voice on the phone and Bryan wanted to scream. "Is this Bryan Edison?"

 

Bryan scrubbed a hand over his face before saying, "Yes."

 

"Sir, my name is Rob Kracklauer, and I'm your daughter Annie's caseworker. She asked me to call on her behalf when she got your message."

 

"So she's still there."

 

Rob hesitated, but then confirmed, "Yes."

 

"But she won't…" Bryan dropped into the nearest chair, which rolled backwards from the force of his weight. "Can I speak to her?"

 

"I'm sorry, Mr. Edison."

 

Bryan didn't bother correcting him to 'Dr. Edison.'

 

"She did want me to deliver a message."

 

Bryan could think of nothing else to say other than, "Yes."

 

Rob cleared his throat. "Annie wanted me to know that she heard your message, and that she knows you want to see her. However, while she would like me to make it clear to you that she's getting the help she needs for her Adderall addiction and is doing very well…" he cleared his throat again, though Bryan suspected it had more to do with stalling than anything caught in the other man's throat, "…she's not willing to see any visitors."

 

Bryan remained silent.

 

"Mr. Edison?" Rob asked cautiously after a moment.

 

Bryan blurted out, "What if I just come out there? If she knows I'm there, that I'm right there waiting, she might change her mind."

 

Rob's voice was gentle but firm, and Bryan thought about how much training the caseworker must have gone through to be able to hit that particular balance at will. "Mr. Edison, I understand that this is very difficult for you. It's been difficult for Annie too. She really is doing very well. But I've spoken to Annie on this matter, and she seems…quite certain that this is the best choice for her."

 

"But she could change her mind," Bryan begged.

 

"I don't think she will," said Rob with finality.

 

Bryan was silent again, but this time Rob didn't bother calling his name to see if he was still on the line. Instead, he just waited until Bryan asked, "She heard my message? The actual message that I left?"

 

"Yes. Mr. Edison--"

 

But Bryan hung up his cell phone before Rob could continue. Gazing around at his surroundings, he considered breaking something just to see if it made him feel better. The lab was full of glassware that could be easily excused and replaced if broken.

 

Instead Bryan stood from his chair, which rolled away even further backwards when pushed by the backs of Bryan's knees straightening. He picked up the dry erase marker from the floor and located its cap, securing the two safely together. Then he stripped off his white coat and hung it on the hook next to the door before making his way back to his office, adding a detour to human resources on the way to announce that he would be going home sick for the day. Once back at his apartment, Bryan flopped onto his bed and barely left it until the next morning, when he rose at his usual hour of six o'clock, showered, shaved, and arrived at work precisely on time to begin his Tuesday.


	8. Bryan Edison, pt II

It's another Monday, nearly a decade after Bryan's aborted conversation with Rob the caseworker. Bryan still works in the same building, but his office has been upgraded significantly as his administrative duties have increased and his time in the lab has decreased. Usually around this time on a Monday afternoon, Bryan would be starting to answer the e-mails that had arrived during the weekend. He'd be chewing gum to freshen his breath after his early lunch and hopefully get some of the minuscule food particles out of his teeth, unless he could feel something really stubbornly stuck in there, like a seed or something, in which case he'd be in the bathroom down the hall flossing -- his office hasn't been upgraded quite enough to have one en suite.

 

Instead, at this very moment, Bryan's twenty seven-year-old daughter is standing in front of him and it's the first time he's seen her in person in a dozen years. He lost the exact count of how long it had been several years ago, but it wouldn't be difficult to figure out down to the minute. She's already explained that she has a wealthy friend who can produce pretty much anyone, and that she has some news. Bryan's e-mail correspondence, already slowed to a trickle for the holiday season, can wait.

 

"I'm getting married," Annie says quickly, with none of the drama and grandeur that Bryan has been led to believe usually accompanies such an announcement from a daughter to her father. "And you can come if you want, but you won't be giving me away. Or sitting in the front row. That's for family. You can sit in the regular seating with the rest of the acquaintances."

 

She's still matter-of-fact, cutting to the point as soon as possible. She has no time for games. Bryan wants to ask her what she's been doing with her life, who she's marrying, who she's become…but he's not sure yet if questions are a welcome addition to this conversation. Reading his thoughts on his face in that unnerving way she was always able to as a child, Annie's face noticeably softens.

 

"My fiancé…" she begins haltingly, and even through the awkwardness Bryan catches the delighted glint in her eye at the word as she toys with the ring on her left hand, "he hadn't talked to his father in a long time. But after we got engaged, he decided he wanted to find him. And tell him about it. And tell him a lot of other things that needed to be said. So our friend, he found his dad. Well…we found out he was dead." Her eyes dart away from him, around his office, across his framed degrees and the patents hung in a neat grid on the south wall. Bryan has three more patents in a closet behind him but he's waiting to get one more before he hangs them up so the grid's pattern won't be irregular. At one point Annie would have wholeheartedly understood and supported that logic. Something about the way her hair is hanging loose now, though, with almost the hint of a wave daring to emerge, and the drapey cut of her stylish business suit makes Bryan wonder if that's still true. Annie sighs. "And that wasn't how I wanted it to go with us…I mean, that's not how I wanted it to end. With...." Her head tilts and a tiny grimace contorts her mouth.

 

Bryan, who remembers every word Rob the caseworker said, nods dumbly. Annie looks more like Ellen than she used to, the baby fat having melted away to reveal an impressive and familiar bone structure. Bryan hasn't talked to Ellen in years now either, not since the day of the Riverside graduation. Their prenuptial agreement had precluded him from needing to pay alimony, and Annie's departure from the family fold had taken away the only other reason the former husband and wife might have had to exchange any communication at all.

 

"Dad?"

 

Bryan realizes he still hasn't said anything since Annie began talking. He takes another brief moment to appreciate her calling him "Dad," a name he hasn't gone by for a decade, before finally speaking. "Sorry. Um. This is...a lot to absorb. In a very short amount of time."

 

"I've been getting that reaction a lot lately. You're not alone."

 

"Have you…told your mother?" Bryan winces, not knowing how sensitive Annie will be to the topic after all this time.

 

Annie does take a deep, shaking breath at the mention of her mother, but says slowly, "I wrote her a letter. She probably has it by now. I told her the news…but I'm not inviting her to my wedding."

 

"Why?" Bryan can't help blurting out. He's not sure there's a way to incorporate social grace into a conversation like this anyway, so he's abandoned the effort. "I just mean…why me and not her?"

 

Annie levels a gaze at him, but there's finally something a little soft in her expression and Bryan thinks that he can catch just a glimpse of his daughter as he last saw her at the age of fifteen, so obviously unhappy but grateful for the rare attention she got from her father. "I haven't completely forgiven you for leaving me the way you did," she says bluntly. "I may never forgive you. But I also haven't forgotten that you at least tried. It was too little, and too late, but you tried, and that's something Mom never did." A smile starts to form across Annie's lips. "Besides, my mother-in-law is kind of great. She's been doing all of that mother-of-the-bride stuff with me, so…I don't really need Mom." She drops her voice and shakes her head on that last part, almost saying it to herself.

 

Bryan says nothing. He can't think of anything to add to what she's said that won't damage the fragile fabric of their conversation.

 

"Which is not saying that I need you," Annie adds, and it's clear that she's not trying to be cruel, so Bryan bites down and tries not to take it that way. "I just needed to give you a chance. If you want it."

 

Bryan nods, again. It feels like there should be more to say, but even Annie is looking at a loss for words, having run out of steam after her first couple of planned speeches were over.

 

"So…" Annie ventures. "I guess that's it." She nods firmly and starts to turn and go.

 

"Annie." The name comes out of Bryan's mouth, unbidden, and she turns back to him expectantly. Bryan, however, is busy marveling at how long it's been since he's said his daughter's name out loud. He's spent several years trying to pretend to himself that he hasn't spent every day craving his daughter's forgiveness. He never expected her to come back to him like this and so he's become accustomed to acting like he didn't want her to. But now she's come to him and he'll be damned if he'll let her walk out without letting her know that he wants to try.

 

It's been a lonely ten years.

 

"How long are you in town for?" are what end up being Bryan's next words. "Would you…can I take you out to dinner? Or something? Before you leave? Maybe tonight?"

 

Annie looks a little sheepish. "I actually live here now."

 

"You do?"

 

"I did my master's at Regis and I've been here ever since."

 

"Oh." Bryan imagines what might have happened if he had run into Annie on the street, or at the grocery store, or in his favorite restaurant having dinner with her fiancé. Maybe he's seen her fiancé on the street, or stood behind him in line, or had an idle conversation with him while waiting for a cab.

 

"My friend found your home address too, and we actually only live a couple of miles from you."

 

There's not enough air in the room. Bryan has a sudden urge to open a window, but they live in Denver -- _Annie lives in Denver_ \-- and it's December.

 

December…

 

"It's your birthday soon," Bryan blurts out, remembering.

 

Annie nods, not indicating whether she's surprised or not that he's retained this information.

 

"Maybe I could buy you dinner then?"

 

She shakes her head now. "We're going to visit friends in Greendale that weekend and staying for New Year's."

 

"Okay," says Bryan, but before he can decide what his next offer should be, Annie's beat him to it.

 

"My Christmas Eve is free." He voice is generous but shy.

 

"Yes," Bryan says immediately. "Dinner. Any restaurant, your choice."

 

"I'll think about it," says Annie. "The restaurant, I mean, not…we're on for dinner." Her eyes narrow a bit. "By the way, I'm telling you right now that my fiancé just turned forty-one. You have from now until our dinner to get used to that fact, because I am not having that fight again."

 

Bryan's reeling from that bomb as he tries to stammer, "I don't-- I mean, I wouldn't--"

 

"I don't mean with you," Annie says simply. "I mean with him."

 

Bryan fiddles with his tie for a moment, sensing a land mine and trying to decide where to tread next. "Can I ask his name?" he tries, and is rewarded with a smile from Annie.

 

"Jeff," she says. "Jeff Winger. He's a lawyer."

 

"And you are…" Bryan trails off.

 

"Oh!" Annie seems to have genuinely forgotten that Bryan doesn't know a thing about her life now. There's a floppy bow at the neck of the blouse underneath her blazer, and her hands fly there to adjust the knot briefly, a little proudly. "I work at Saint Joseph. Administration."

 

"Good for you."

 

"Thank you." Annie checks her sleek watch and continues, "Speaking of which, I'm actually on lunch right now, so I should probably…" she gestures vaguely over her shoulder towards the door. Her engagement ring catches a ray of sun from Bryan's office window as she does. It's sizable but tasteful. Bryan briefly wonders if Annie picked it out herself or if she actually managed to find a mate who has taste on par with her own. Maybe the watch was a gift from him too. Even when she was a dumpy fifteen-year-old, she'd had high standards for everything from her brand of index card to what she got Bryan for Father's Day. He tries to remember what tie he's wearing today without having to look down at it. He hopes she likes it. She's shaking the cuff of her blazer sleeve back over her watch, where it falls neatly, and looking at him expectantly.

 

"Right," agrees Bryan, desperate for her not to leave but knowing she will. "Let me just…" he starts to reach for one of the business cards in the holder on his desk, but Annie waves him off.

 

"I have all of your information," she reminds him.

 

When Annie opens the door of Bryan's office, she freezes for a moment before physically relaxing further than she has since entering the room -- maybe further than Bryan has ever seen from his intense, stress-prone daughter. She lets go of the door handle easily and strides into the waiting area just outside. Bryan walks just enough towards the door to be able to see the couch upon which a lean man in early middle age is lounging in an expensive-looking suit. He puts down his magazine when he meets Annie's eye and runs a hand through his stylishly greying hair.

 

"I told you not to come," Bryan can hear Annie say as she approaches him.

 

The man stands. He towers over Bryan's still-diminutive daughter. "And I came," is his reply.

 

In the next moment it seems that Annie has completely wrapped herself up in this man who can only be Jeff Winger, who buries his nose in her hair as his arms envelop her. He presses a kiss there before looking up to meet Bryan's eye, as if he knew beyond a doubt that Annie's father would be there. His face betrays none of his thoughts.

 

Bryan, however, is sure that this man, this Jeff Winger, is able to read every ideation that is flitting unchecked through Bryan's mind. He's sure his instinct should be to despise this man, who probably has receding gums to go with his grey hair, for taking Bryan's little girl away from him. He's seen enough movies and been to enough weddings of his colleagues' daughters to know that's how it goes.

 

The problem is that Bryan doesn't have Annie to start with. He hasn't for quite some time. And this urbane woman standing between them is so far from the last version of Annie Edison that Bryan knows he has a right to lay a claim on that all he can muster is a deeply buried ache of regret. There may as well be an impenetrable glass wall between Bryan and the couple as Bryan's hold Jeff's gaze.

 

Annie steps back, still clinging loosely to Jeff's waist, and his eyes dart down to meet hers as his hands brush up and down her upper arms. The glass wall becomes one-way glass. "Did you eat yet?" Jeff asks. Bryan watches the back of Annie's head as it bobs up and down. "Good, me too."

 

Jeff gathers Annie under one arm and escorts her towards the elevators with only a split-second glance back towards Bryan, who's still not entirely sure he hasn't become totally invisible to the twosome. They disappear around the corner, and when Bryan hears the tell-tale ding of the elevator he knows they're gone. He slowly closes his office door. When he's back at his desk he presses a random key on his keyboard to startle the computer out of sleep mode, but instead of opening his e-mails, he pulls up his calendar and selects December 24.

 

"New Event -> Dinner with Annie."


	9. Vaughn Miller, pt I

Vaughn gazed down at Annie, clutching her water bottle in the middle of a kegger and looking crestfallen. He hadn't wanted to admit to himself that he had hoped a little, in the time it had taken him to reach her since getting the offer, that she would be sad to see him go -- after all, he never wanted his mountain flower to be sad. Not really. But he couldn't help that it gave him a warm feeling in the pit of his stomach to know how much it bummed her out that he'd be leaving, that she was going to miss him.

 

And he was going to miss her too.

 

He was going to miss her boysenberry smell and her high-pitched sighs and how adorable she was when she tried to appear relaxed, even though Vaughn knew she was inwardly stressing out about something or other. She tried her best to hide it from him, but Vaughn knew Annie always had something to stress out about, though he liked to think there had been an improvement in that area lately, and maybe that he'd had something to do with it. It was getting less and less difficult to convince her to spend time outside with him, just sitting under the tree and not studying, even if it was usually only for half an hour or so at a time. Hell, this morning she had been contentedly teaching herself to play a bongo drum before taking off with Jeff. And she had seemed relaxed. Happy, even. Maybe she was becoming happy. Maybe Vaughn could keep making her happy.

 

In that second the answer was clear.

 

"Come with me," he said.

 

Her response was immediate and predictable. "What?"

 

"We could go to Delaware together." It had only been ten seconds since he thought of the idea and Vaughn was already excited. He imagined the two of them road tripping out there together in his '95 Crown Vic, finding a place to live and moving in together, starting a new band -- maybe Annie would join them on some songs to play the bongo drum and he could introduce her to the crowd as his mountain flower and she would blush as she walked onstage to give him a kiss before they started the song...

 

From the awed but wary look on Annie's face, Vaughn discerned that her mind was probably heading in a similar direction to his, but she wasn't quite as willing to trust the visions of domestic and musical bliss. "Don't you think it's...a little fast?"

 

"Not if it's right, babe," Vaughn assured her.

 

Her gaze then flitted somewhere over Vaughn's shoulder. When he looked, he saw Shirley, apparently discussing the logistics of doing a keg stand with the two guys who would be holding her legs, if he was reading the gestures correctly. He turned back to Annie, whose face had become wistful.

 

Vaughn wrapped his arm around her shoulders and led her away, a little ways down the hall. "I know you've got your study buds and everything," he said in her ear, "but you'll always be connected to them if it's meant to be that way. And you'll make new friends." They came to a halt and Annie turned to him with a doubtful look on his face. "Of course you will." He tucked a lock of hair from her temple behind her ear. "Look at you. Who could resist loving you?"

 

Annie melted visibly, but wasn't entirely convinced. "It's not just them I have to think about," she protested. "What about school?"

 

"You'd transfer in with me."

 

"And my apartment? And my car, and..." but Annie seemed to have run out of things that were keeping her here. She deflated, looking confused.

 

"We can do this, mountain flower," he encouraged. "I want you to make a _new_ life. With me."

 

"Can I have some time to think about it?" Annie pleaded, and Vaughn could already see her making a list of pros and cons in her head that was just dying to be written down on one of those sheets of flowered paper that she kept on a pad on her desk at home and she thought he didn't know about.

 

"I wish you could take as much time as you needed," Vaughn said honestly, "but I've got to leave tomorrow."

 

"Tomorrow?" Annie squeaked.

 

Vaughn only nodded. There wasn't much left to say at this point. He sort of wished he had his guitar with him.

 

Annie glanced around her as if she'd find the right answer written on one of the flyers that plastered the walls of the dormitory hallway around them. Something through the nearest doorway seemed to catch her eye and she looked at it fixedly. Vaughn followed her gaze to find Britta sitting on a bottom bunk with Jeff. Jeff was reaching out a hand towards Britta's hair and Britta's response was to jerk so hard she hit her head on the bottom of the top bunk. Vaughn chuckled involuntarily before catching himself. He looked at Annie with a guilty expression already making its way onto his face, hoping to avoid another disappointed reprimand about making an effort to get along with her friends, but Annie didn't seem to have noticed. She was still watching Britta and Jeff. She didn't look sad or confused anymore, just thoughtful.

 

"Yes," she said without looking at him, and Vaughn was sure he'd heard her wrong over the noise of the party.

 

"What?"

 

Now she turned to face him fully and there was excitement in her eyes, as well as some disbelief, like even she had trouble grasping what she had said. "Yes, I'll go."

 

"That's great!" Vaughn enthused, and punctuated his exclamation by wrapping her in a hug and lifting her so that her feet dangled inches from the ground. She kicked a little bit, letting out squealing giggles until he set her down.

 

Her face became serious again as he pulled back. "But can we wait to leave until tomorrow night? So I can go to the dance? Just because...you know, Britta's nominated for queen, and I told the Dean I'd help out, and I do have this new dress, and..." she looked back towards Jeff and Britta, who were now standing in the company of a leggy brunette. Annie wrinkled her nose for half a second before turning back to Vaughn and finishing, "And I want to tell my friends at the right time, you know?"

 

Vaughn grinned down at her. "For you? Yeah, we can make that happen."

 

Annie's eyes popped out. "Oh! I have to get going, then! I have to pack and start making the arrangements to transfer my credits and talk to my landlord--" Though her mouth was going a mile a minute, she already looked a little calmer with a list of tasks in mind. She pressed a kiss to his lips before rushing off in a flurry of floral skirts. Vaughn gazed after her, trying to believe his own good luck.

 

She had only been out of sight for seconds when Jeff's voice came from behind Vaughn. "You haven't seen Abed, have you?"

 

Vaughn turned. "Nope. Just got here."

 

Jeff looked up and down the hallway. "Wasn't Annie just out here?"

 

"Yeah. Just took off. She, ah, had some stuff to do."

 

Jeff nodded distractedly, with a hint of disappointment. "Of course she does. It's not like classes are over or anything." He drained his drink and threw a look over his shoulder before grimacing at Vaughn. "I think I'm gonna get going too." He stuffed his cup into a trash bag hanging off of the nearest doorknob. "If you see Abed, will you let him know?"

 

Vaughn nodded. "'Night, man. Take it easy. See you."

 

Jeff was already walking away, in the opposite direction that Annie had gone, throwing a weary wave over his shoulder.

 

There were plenty of texts from Annie the next day, asking Vaughn questions, sending him updates, and reminding him not to let word get around that she'd be going with him until she got a chance to talk to her study group at the dance. There were also random questions, like how far from the ocean they would be and did he know whether or not Delaware observed Daylight Savings Time? Vaughn answered every one of the texts patiently and immediately, even when he was at his farewell dinner with his sister. He imagined what it would be like when he and Annie cruised past the Greendale city limits later that night with sweet tunes playing and Annie draped easily over the passenger seat, her right hand playing with the wind that rushed past her open window. When he packed the car with his own bags before going over to campus to meet Annie, he made sure he had an extra bongo drum for her.

 

It was close to twenty-four hours after their initial conversation about Delaware that Vaughn was loading Annie's few bags into the backseat of his car after picking her up at the dance. "So it went okay telling your friends? They seemed pretty cool about it."

 

He stood up straight and found Annie's face flushing rapidly. "I didn't tell them," she admitted, "not really. They all think I'm only going for the summer. Well, except Jeff."

 

"Jeff?"

 

She nodded. "He'll tell them after I'm already gone. I just...I didn't want anyone to try and talk me out of it."

 

Vaughn nodded slowly back as he walked around to open the passenger side door for Annie. "And Jeff..."

 

"He said he hopes it works out," said Annie as she sunk into the car and smoothed her dress over her thighs. "And that I should visit."

 

Vaughn pushed her door closed and slid between his own front bumper and that of the car opposite his to reach the driver's side. He settled in behind the wheel and looked at Annie. He didn't ask, but she answered anyway.

 

She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. "I don't know! He just seemed like the right person to tell, okay?"

 

"I didn't say anything," claimed Vaughn, and turned the key in the ignition. He backed out of his parking spot as Annie rolled down her window and then wiggled around, trying to find a comfortable position in her seat. He navigated his way through the parking lot towards the street, starting to get that deliciously fresh feeling that comes from knowing there's one of life's adventures lying in wait for you, just needing to be found. Though the parking lot was crowded with cars Vaughn could already see in his mind the dark, open highway sliding away underneath his car, white dash after white dash disappearing at the bottom of his windshield.

 

"Stop the car." The edged words came abruptly from Annie in the passenger's seat.

 

Vaughn started to brake and stole a glance over at her. "Did you forget something at the dance?"

 

But Annie was gripping the side of her seat so that her knuckles had turned white, shaking her head in a panic. "I can't do this."

 

Vaughn brought the car to a full stop, still inside the parking lot, his hand hovering over the gear shift without yet moving it into park.

 

"Delaware?" she was exclaiming softly, almost to herself. "What am I supposed to do in Delaware? I don't know anyone there. I haven't even been able to look into dentists in the area, and I'll have no idea where I should go for N.A. meetings…"

 

"Annie." Vaughn shifted into park and had to repeat her name twice more before she met his eye. "You'll know me, mountain flower. We can figure it out. We love each other. That's always enough."

 

He could tell, however, that he'd already lost her, which was only confirmed when she mumbled "not always" and finished: "This just isn't who I am."

 

Annie was out of the car before Vaughn could speak again. When she opened the back door to pull her duffel bag and backpack out he managed to get in an "Annie" before she slammed the door again and was standing next to the car, leaning over so she could see in through the open window.

 

She didn't quite meet Vaughn's eyes as she whispered, "I just need you to trust me and believe me when I say…when I say I'd be going with you for the wrong reasons."

 

With just as much determination as she had gone off to prepare for this trip last night, Annie scurried back towards the school buildings. Vaughn sat with his eye on the rear view mirror, watching long enough to see her to collapse onto a bench illuminated by a lamp post some distance behind him and start taking deep breaths. They were too quick at first and Vaughn kept watching to make sure she didn't hyperventilate. Then the breaths became slow and even, and her body relaxed and slumped into the bench.

 

Vaughn tried to figure out what he should do. He had convinced her to go with him once. Maybe he could do it again. At the very least he could offer her a ride home. On the other hand, he was pretty sure they had just broken up, so maybe that wasn't the way to handle things. He glanced at the clock on his dashboard, mentally calculating how long it would be before it was absolutely necessary that he leave so as to make it to Delaware on time.

 

His cell phone chimed, the one Annie had helped him pick out after he had thrown his previous one in the river. Vaughn dug it out of his pocket and flipped it open to read the message.

 

**From: Annie**  
go 

 

Vaughn tossed his phone onto the vacated passenger seat, put the car in drive, and went.


	10. Vaughn Miller, pt II

Vaughn barely suppresses an eye-roll as he trails after his companion, who has bounded through the door of the liquor store like someone is waiting inside to give him a million dollars. He should have insisted that his sister take her own idiot husband for a restocking mission, eight months pregnant or not. The store is crowded with last-minute shoppers picking out their poison of choice for New Year's Eve parties and Vaughn doesn't doubt that his already-buzzed brother-in-law will manage to annoy and/or offend at least three people by the time they get back out of here.

 

Uninterested in following him on what's sure to be a frenzied path through most of the store, Vaughn wanders aimlessly. He glances cursorily at the wines on the shelves surrounding him, noting the gradient they make from deep red to pink to white. He stops just short of walking into a small brunette woman when he reaches the sparkling wines at the end of the aisle and mutters a "sorry" with probably a little less civility than he would usually be able to muster. The woman doesn't seem to register his lack of courtesy as she turns to him and starts to say, with great grace, "Oh, not at…"

 

The rest of the sentence is lost as Vaughn looks into the eyes of Annie Edison for the first time in well over eight years.

 

"Vaughn," she breathes, with an expression of awe. Vaughn, without even meaning to, drinks it in for a moment, remembering the adoring way she used to look at him back when she was nineteen, before her face becomes a display of purely platonic delight and she lets out a high-pitched "ha!" before throwing her arms around his shoulders. "I can't believe it's you!" she squeals in his ear.

 

Vaughn's own arms wrap around her waist. He suddenly wants to pick her up and spin her in circles the way he used to, but his eyes are open and he can still see the liquor store around them -- this isn't the Greendale quad, and he's not barefoot, and she's not nineteen anymore. He does a quick calculation in his head -- she must be twenty-seven. No, her birthday is in December, he remembers, so twenty-eight now. The sensation of Annie releasing him and stepping back to gaze at his face jolts Vaughn back and he realizes that he hasn't said anything yet.

 

"Hi." He can do better than that. "Hey, Annie." A small improvement. "How's it going?"

 

"I'm terrific," Annie beams at him. "How about you? Are you back in town? Oh, how have you been?" Vaughn's not surprised that he doesn't even get a chance to try answering before her eyes pop out and she ducks her head around the corner, apparently seeking someone out. "Jeff!"

 

Vaughn's own eyes feel like they must be coming out of their sockets.

 

Annie doesn't notice. "Jeff!" she calls again, happily. "Come here! You'll never guess who it is!"

 

And there he is. Coming around the corner, clutching a bottle of something brown, towering over Annie and even Vaughn a little. He looks older -- he _is_ older, Vaughn reminds himself, they all are -- but he still has the carefully crafted scruff on his face, the streamlined suit, the default winning-but-condescending look that Vaughn has never seen on anyone else but Jeff Winger.

 

"Vaughn," he says with surprise, but in a friendly enough way.

 

"Hey, Jeff," Vaughn says back, offering his hand to shake. "How's it going? Happy New Year."

 

"Yeah, you too."

 

"So?" Annie cuts in brightly. "Are you back in Greendale?"

 

"Just visiting," says Vaughn, dragging his eyes back down the considerable distance to Annie. "Spending the holidays with my sister and her husband."

 

"Oh, Mac got married?" Annie gushes. "That's so great!"

 

"Sure," says Vaughn vaguely. "You're still here, then?"

 

"Denver, actually," Annie corrects. "We're just here for the long weekend; heading back Wednesday."

 

Jeff stays silent during this explanation, apparently content to let Annie speak for the both of them. Vaughn pushes down the thought that's rising quickly in his head, telling himself that if they both live in Denver now, it's perfectly understandable that they would have made the trip out here together. It was fiscally and environmentally responsible. Those had both always been big concerns of Annie's.

 

"So is your whole little study group here?" Vaughn half-jokes, trying to check his surroundings surreptitiously in case Britta's about to come barreling out of the vodka section.

 

"Just us right now," Annie assures him.

 

"Yeah," Jeff echoes, "just us." And he throws an arm over Annie's shoulders. The thought is getting harder for Vaughn to push down. It's quickly evolving into a suspicion.

 

"We're just picking up some things on our way to Abed's party," says Annie, moving just a little bit into Jeff so she's nearly nestling into his side. Vaughn can only nod. After a moment or two of silence, Annie frowns. "Is that why you're here?"

 

"No," Vaughn answers, "I'm just the driver for my brother-in-law. He, ah...started the party a little early."

 

Jeff only smirks as Annie turns her gaze to him. Her left arm wraps around his waist as she fake-muses, "Hmm, imagine that."

 

Jeff probably replies to her. His reply is probably chock-full of biting wit or something. But Vaughn is busy, having been distracted by a flash of light from Annie's left hand as she moved it. There, on her third finger, reflecting the fluorescent lights of the liquor store's ceiling, is a diamond ring. The suspicion Vaughn has been trying to suppress breaks through the wall of denial and dances around singing _"I told you so!"_ The hand that has Vaughn so transfixed suddenly squeezes the side of Jeff's waist, and he flinches and grins, withdrawing his arm from around Annie's shoulders as she drops her hand from his waist. The two look back at Vaughn, who tries to make his face as blank as possible.

 

"I'm on Designated duty too," Annie says with a little pride, gesturing with a tip of her head towards Jeff.

 

"Annie, I'm fine," Jeff manly-whines.

 

"Not according to the chart," says Annie smugly. "Unless you want to tell me the weight on your driver's license is wrong? Then I might think about letting you drive."

 

Jeff huffs. "What do you know," he grits out. "I do think my depth perception is a little off." A crash sounds in the next aisle and Jeff winces. "Not as off as that guy, though," he adds.

 

As Vaughn has been expecting, a familiar voice comes from the same direction as the crash. "I'm okay! It's okay! Nothing's broken! I'll put it back."

 

Jeff chuckles. Annie looks concerned. "Do you think he's all right? Maybe we should go see."

 

"He said he's fine, Annie."

 

"But you know how dangerous New Year's Eve can get," Annie protests to Jeff, who rolls his eyes and grumbles something about her mentioning it on the car ride there. "We should at least make sure someone's looking after him."

 

"Someone is," says Vaughn miserably as his sister's husband comes around the corner behind Jeff and Annie with a full basket swinging from his hand.

 

"Vaughn!" he shouts. "There you are!"

 

"Yeah," Vaughn says to him.

 

"Oh," gasps Annie.

 

"Yeah," Vaughn repeats. A heavy arm is thrown around his shoulders. Gesturing to the man next to him without looking, Vaughn introduces, "This is Annie, and Jeff. They're, uh, old friends from school. Guys, this is Yngwie."

 

Neither Annie nor Jeff offers a hand to shake. Jeff smiles weakly at Yngwie while Annie seems to be searching her brain for something. "Yngwie," she mumbles, and her face suddenly lights up. "Wait..."

 

Yngwie squeezes Vaughn's shoulders. "Yes ma'am, you're thinking correctly," he says proudly. "Yngwie Macadangdang Jr. at your service." He seizes Annie's hand from her side and brings it to his mouth for a kiss. Jeff, with a vague look of revulsion, reaches out and takes Annie's hand in his own, drawing it back in between the two. Annie's own expression of shock and discomfort is so familiar that Vaughn wants to laugh for a moment. Then Yngwie speaks again and the urge dies.

 

"So you've heard of me," Yngwie declares.

 

Annie nods warily. "Once or twice."

 

"Down, Yngwie," Vaughn mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

 

"So you two...played hacky-sack together?" queries Annie, making a valiant attempt to be polite as Jeff continues to survey the whole situation with some disdain.

 

"After I finished out in Delaware," Vaughn confirms. "Then we were traveling, and we came through Colorado so my family came out to see us, and..." he trails off, trusting Annie to fill in the rest of the story for herself. Yngwie doesn't seem to see the need for her to.

 

"I married Miss Mackenzie Miller," proclaims Yngwie proudly, drawing out every "m" sound. Vaughn clenches his jaw.

 

Annie looks to Vaughn, surprised. "Really?"

 

"Wait," Jeff cuts in. "So now her name is Mackenzie Macadangdang?"

 

"For five glorious months now," drawls Yngwie. "And a baby on the way!"

 

Even such a pathetic specimen as Yngwie apparently can't deter Annie from her glee at this announcement. "Aww!" she coos. "When is she due?"

 

"February third," answer Vaughn and Yngwie in unison, but with very different tones. Yngwie hiccups and then burps in Vaughn's ear.

 

Vaughn flinches. "You're on thin ice, Yngwie."

 

Annie's face has fallen a little. "Oh." Next to her, though, Jeff is finally looking amused. "Well, babies are great, in any case," Annie tries. "You must be so excited!"

 

"You bet!" says Yngwie, at the same time Vaughn says "Not really."

 

Annie looks distraught now, so Vaughn asks squeamishly, "You haven't...do you have kids now?"

 

"No," says Jeff, at the same time Annie says "Not yet." Vaughn expects a tense look between the two, but they stand there in relative relaxation, still holding hands. The fact that the two of them are clearly together -- not just together, but engaged, Vaughn corrects himself as he remembers to check Jeff's wedding finger and finds it empty -- has not been mentioned in the conversation and apparently it's not going to be. Vaughn finds that he has no problem with this.

 

Jeff clears his throat obviously and glances at his bare wrist. "We should probably get going," he announces.

 

Annie finally looks a little annoyed at his lack of tact, but she checks her own wrist, which does indeed have a sleek watch on it, and she frowns. "Actually, you're right. I told Abed we'd stop and get some ice, too."

 

"Did you pick a champagne?"

 

Annie nods and plucks the bottle she had been studying when Vaughn nearly bumped into her from a nearby shelf, handing it to Jeff.

 

Jeff nods curtly to the two other men. "Vaughn...Yngwie." He chuckles a little and heads off to the cash register, leaving Annie alone with Vaughn and the parasite still hanging on his shoulder who is, unfortunately, related to him by law.

 

"You didn't mention where you're living now," blurts out Annie, looking relieved to have thought of a change of subject.

 

"Seattle," says Vaughn. "Been there about a year."

 

"Oh, that's far," says Annie, and she actually looks a little disappointed.

 

"Yeah," agrees Vaughn. "But hey, I'll probably be back after the baby's born."

 

"He can't miss meeting Yngwie Macadangdang the third!" chortles Yngwie. Vaughn shuts his eyes.

 

When he opens them, Annie is pulling something out of her purse. "Will you let me know when you come back to town?" She hands him a business card. "Denver isn't that far."

 

Vaughn studies the card, and then Annie's face. She suddenly looks a little bashful. "Yeah, of course, mountain flower."

 

Annie turns bright pink. "Great! Okay, I have to go. I don't mean to dash off..."

 

"No worries," Vaughn tells her, and for the first time in a long time he means it.

 

Annie glows with affectionate nostalgia at the phrase. "It was wonderful to see you! And, um, nice to meet you...Yngwie."

 

"Milady," Yngwie replies, bowing as deeply as he can without letting go of his grip around Vaughn's neck. Vaughn gets pulled down along for the ride a bit before he jerks the both of them back upright. Annie's look of distaste has returned in spades and she starts to scurry off to the exit to the store, where Jeff is now waiting with a paper bag.

 

Vaughn calls after her. "Bye, Annie! Good to see you! Take care!"

 

She spins around and waves without pausing in her scamper towards Jeff. "Happy New Year!" She spins around again and she and Jeff disappear through the door, a bell dinging softly behind them.

 

"That was the ex, wasn't it?" crows Yngwie. "The one who was supposed to come to Delaware and ditched you at the last minute."

 

Vaughn, who had not been expecting this level of acumen from Yngwie, can only nod, still looking at the door.

 

Yngwie's elevation to the level of a normal functioning human being, though, appears to have been only momentary. He snickers. "Sucker."

 

"Can it, Yngwie."


	11. Abed Nadir, pt I

Abed liked these moments. He liked his study group's adventures, sure, and more often than not he was a major proponent of their shenanigans, but all the space bus adventures and hallucinatory trips through Winter Wonderland wouldn't mean as much without the moments spent winding down on a couch at the end of yet another Greendale dance. He and Troy had spotted Shirley giving her feet a break in a cozy corner of the cafeteria and wordlessly joined her on the couch. Troy had promptly leaned back and closed his eyes, though Abed knew he wasn't asleep. Dancing always took a lot out of him. Sometimes after modern dance class Troy would come over to Abed's dorm room, ostensibly to play video games, but always ended up taking a nap on the lower bunk. One time Annie had come over because her philosophy class had been cancelled, and the two took turns trying to get popcorn to land in his open mouth. Abed won, and when Troy woke up half an hour later he had merely chewed the mouthful of popcorn, swallowed, and plopped down between the two on the couch to watch a _Golden Girls_ rerun.

 

Abed himself merely watched the remaining dancers, who over the course of the night had firmly paired off and were now tiredly swaying to some song about gravity. He decided that four of the couples would end up going home together. Spotting a pretty brunette alone at another seating area across the room, Abed briefly debated breaking his usual pattern and going over to talk to her, but remembering Troy at his side, kept his seat and instead turned his mind to the task of coming up with a good outing for the group to take next month on St. Patrick's Day. A moment later, his view of the brunette was blocked by Annie's midsection.

 

"Have you seen Pierce?"

 

Abed looked up to meet her gaze. She looked troubled. "I did, about twenty minutes ago. He looked like he was on his way out."

 

Annie nodded. "He must have gone home." She looked only marginally reassured, but sank onto the couch next to Abed. She turned her body slightly into him and snuggled into his side, letting out a deep sigh. Abed could feel her breast brush against his upper arm. Neither one of them bothered mentioning it. "We missed you at judo today."

 

"I had stuff to do with Troy." Abed had found that this answer usually had the desired effect of providing a reason for almost anything without further interrogation. This time there was the added benefit of it being true.

 

As expected, Annie merely bobbed her head up and down, bumping her chin against his shoulder in her acknowledgement that she had heard and understood. "You'll be there on Thursday, though, right?"

 

"Sure."

 

Across the way, the pretty brunette was standing to accept someone's gallantly offered hand for a dance. As the pair turned to make their way to the floor, Abed saw that the man was Dr. Rich, who waved cheerily to the group on the couch. Abed let Annie's half-hearted wave in return speak for the both of them. On her finger was a cheap plastic ring with a cheap plastic pink gemstone in the shape of a heart. There had been a basket of them on the way into the dance -- Greendale's idea of party favors, Abed supposed. He hadn't seen anyone else wearing one all night, except for Dean Pelton who had two or three on each hand.

 

"You're the best one in the class now," observed Abed. "You could move up to the next level if you wanted."

 

He felt Annie shrug against him. "This one fits really well into my schedule, and I wouldn't want to ask to change my hours at work so soon after I started."

 

This made sense as a reason for Annie, which was why Abed was slightly surprised when she continued, "Plus I like getting to see you. You know, outside of anthropology or study group. Just the two of us."

 

"Yeah, I like it too," Abed said automatically, before stopping to think about it. Sometimes he and Annie helped each other stretch out before class. And occasionally he would walk her to her car after class, before heading back to his dorm room in the opposite direction, if they were in the middle of a good conversation. He _did_ like seeing Annie in judo class.

 

"You and Troy are kind of the only ones I see outside of big group stuff anymore," Annie remarked.

 

"You just spent the whole day with Britta," Abed pointed out.

 

Annie response was a drawn-out and doubtful-sounding "Yeeeeeeeah..." but she didn't continue or clarify. She picked at a loose thread on the outer seam of Abed's pants. The heart on her plastic ring caught the reflection of the twinkly lights on the fake trees arranged around the seating area. Rich spun his partner in a neatly executed twirl under his arm before lowering her into an expert dip as the song ended and the deejay announced this next dance would be the last one of the night.

 

"I know what you mean. Jeff and I don't really hang out anymore either."

 

"Same," said Annie glumly.

 

For the first time since she had sat down, Abed turned his head to look at Annie -- or, rather, the top of her head where it was propped up on his shoulder. He had never asked what had happened the night Annie had been shot down by Rich and Jeff had gone running into the rain at the news. All Abed knew was that, if anything, the two had been fighting even more often in the ensuing weeks. To Abed's left, Troy shifted, now apparently half-asleep. Abed turned his face back forwards.

 

"You're an only child, right Abed?" Annie asked unexpectedly.

 

Abed wasn't sure why she was asking this, because she knew the answer. "Yeah. Technically I have a half-brother now but I've never met him."

 

"I'm an only child too," said Annie, continuing in the vein of saying things out loud that both of them knew. "And so is Troy."

 

"So is Jeff," Abed added, unsure where this was going.

 

"And Pierce," agreed Annie softly.

 

Abed thought about asking what was up, but before he came to a decision, Annie sighed again, burrowing even further into Abed's side, resting her head fully on top of his shoulder and taking his hand. Abed knew his shoulders were somewhat boney -- all of him was -- but Annie seemed comfortable as she murmured, a little sadly, "It's nice to have family." 

 

Abed studied their joined hands. Her skin was so much paler than his, and softer -- he knew girls generally had softer hands, but Annie's were among the most unblemished of any he had observed, except for the one callus she always had from holding a pen. He shifted their grip, then slid the plastic heart ring off of Annie's unresisting hand and onto his own finger. He looked down at her again, and though he couldn't see her whole face, he thought she was probably smiling tiredly.

 

Abed felt a vibration in his sweater pocket, accompanied by the once unfamiliar text-message tone of his phone. A split second later, he registered that everyone else's tone had gone off too -- he had them all memorized -- even Britta's who was just approaching the other four. He glanced around curiously as he pulled his phone from his pocket to reveal the words "ONE NEW MESSAGE: JEFF WINGER." Sliding his eyes side to side, he saw that Annie and Troy's phones were displaying similar captions, and assumed the same of Shirley and Britta, who had now taken a seat at the end of the couch and settled onto Shirley's shoulder just as Annie had been settled onto Abed's.

 

Abed read through the text quickly.

 

_It might not shock you guys to hear the real reason we had a fight today. It wasn't about the Barenaked Ladies (although I do have some unresolved issues there). Caring about a person can be scary. Caring about six people can be a horrifying, embarrassing nightmare, at least for me. But if I can't say it today, when can I say it? I love you guys. Oh, and Pierce, take it from an expert, these knuckleheads are right outside your heart. Let them in before it's too late._

 

Abed glanced to his left. Britta, Shirley, and Troy were still gazing at their cell phone screens. Shirley was nodding along as she read and all three of them looked newly serene. Abed turned his gaze back to his own phone briefly.

 

_I love you guys._

 

Looking to his right, Abed saw that Annie was positively beaming at the words on her screen as the soft, tinkly piano music of the last song drew to a cadence. The five occupants of the couch looked at each other uncertainly but happily as the regular fluorescent lighting of the cafeteria replaced the dimmed version used to set the mood. Abed handed Annie her ring back, which she placed on the table next to her before she stood up.

 

"Troy, do you need a ride home?"

 

Troy glanced around. "Aw, man, did Pierce leave without me?"

 

"I think so," answered Abed for her.

 

Troy grumbled as he pulled himself to his feet and then offered a hand to one of Shirley's as Britta offered the other so they could help pull her off the couch, "That dude is lucky I just got put in a better mood."

 

"Come on, I'll take you," said Annie kindly, taking out her keys. "I kind of want to talk to Pierce anyway."

 

"You do?" said Britta skeptically, and Annie turned a light shade of pink before saying defiantly, "Yes."

 

"He's probably passed out already," warned Troy. "And believe me when I say you do not want to be anywhere near him if he starts having a night terror."

 

Annie shrugged. "I'll take my chances."

 

With that settled, the group meandered through the cafeteria doors and through the parking lot. Shirley and Britta split off in the direction of their cars after fond "goodnights," leaving Annie and Troy lingering with Abed. Annie had her phone out again.

 

"Are you texting Jeff back?" asked Abed.

 

"Nope," answered Annie quickly, and slid her phone back into her purse.

 

"That's probably a good idea," commented Abed. "The fact that he sent us all that text is less of a sign that he needed to say it to us all as soon as possible, and more a sign that he's still not ready to admit he cares about us to our faces. He'll probably pretend like it ever happened when we all see him next."

 

Annie looked troubled again, and Abed figured out too late that it was the wrong thing to say. Luckily Troy jumped in with "But that doesn't mean he didn't mean it, right Abed?"

 

Abed nodded and Annie looked appeased. She wrapped her arms around Abed tightly. Abed wondered if the exponential increase in the amount of hugs he'd gotten in that evening was due to the holiday. "I love you," Annie whispered in his ear, and Abed reflected on the similar increase in the amount of times someone had said that to him in the evening as well, before he thought to say back, "Love you too, Annie."

 

When Annie pulled back her gaze was fixed over Abed's shoulder and she smirked a bit before saying loudly, "Come on, Troy, let's go home," and pointedly wrapping her arm around Troy's waist. Troy looked at her a bit quizzically before draping his own arm around her shoulder, raising his eyebrows at Abed, and the two strolled off into the parking lot.

 

Abed turned to head back to the dorms, but was immediately met by the sight of the brunette who had been dancing with Dr. Rich. "Hi," she said breathlessly.

 

"Hi," said Abed.

 

"Fun dance, huh?"

 

"Yeah, it was good."

 

"I'm not quite ready to call it a night yet," she said, grinning. "You want to get a drink?"

 

"Okay," Abed shrugged. "You ever been to the Ballroom?"


	12. Abed Nadir, pt II

Annie looks surprised. Which makes sense, because Abed is walking towards her as he shakes the February snow off of his coat, and Abed, despite his well-honed impression, is not Jeff.

 

"Abed!" she exclaims as he approaches her in the lobby of the chic hotel. She throws her arms around his still-boney shoulders as soon as he reaches her. "What are you doing here? Did Jeff tell you to meet us here?"

 

"Jeff's not coming," explains Abed into the hug. "I'm his proxy."

 

Annie, when she pulls back, looks dangerous. "Jeff's not _what now?_ "

 

But Abed has been thoroughly instructed by Jeff in the best way to defuse Formidable Annie, and recites, "I'm supposed to memorize every detail of what we see so I can report back to him before he agrees to go along with whatever decision you make."

 

Annie cracks a smile. "Uh-huh." Then her brow furrows. "Did he call you a computer again?"

 

"No." The answer was "yes," but Abed has also been instructed not to tell Annie that so as not to waste time letting her rant about Jeff's insensitive choice of words. Unless they finished their tour too early, in which case Abed is to get her ranting about anything necessary. He hopes it doesn't come to that.

 

"Miss Edison?" a throaty female voice comes from off to the side and Annie and Abed both turn to the source of it -- an extremely tall young woman with wavy black hair. She comes nearly to Abed's eye level, even though a quick glance down tells him she's wearing simple ballet flats, much like the ones Annie used to scamper around in during college, rather than high heels. Even in her high heels, Annie is dwarfed by the woman as she accepts her handshake and confirms her identity. "Great! I'm Bianca, and I'll be showing you around today. I understand you and Mr...." she trails off as she offers her hand to Abed next.

 

"Nadir," Abed fills in as he shakes her hand once, twice, three times firmly.

 

"...are looking for a venue for your wedding," Bianca finishes with a bright smile.

 

"That's right," says Annie winningly.

 

"And such a sweet couple," Bianca gushes, the depth of her voice somehow keeping it from sounding condescending. Abed makes a mental note about the counteraction for future casting references. "Let me go grab an info packet and we'll get started right away."

 

As she departs, Abed turns to Annie and says, "We're not gonna tell her I'm not your fiancé?"

 

"You're Jeff's proxy," Annie says reasonably. "You should try to approximate the experience Jeff would have had. Please don't start acting like him again, though," she adds hastily. "You know that freaks me out."

 

"It didn't used to."

 

"I didn't used to be sleeping with him," Annie counters. "Or marrying him," she amends.

 

Bianca returns with a glossy black folder that matches her glossy black hair, telling them she'll show them to the ballroom. Abed offers his arm to Annie. "Ready, Sugarpuss?"

 

Annie takes his arm but rolls her eyes when Bianca has turned her back to lead them deeper into the hotel, muttering, "Dial it back a little."

 

The ballroom seems to be to Annie's liking, which Abed knows is really the only important thing here, but he takes video on his phone anyway. He gets enough footage of the room to give Jeff a good idea if Annie starts quizzing him about it, but mostly he films Annie and her reactions to all of the room's features while she's paying attention to Bianca and not Abed.

 

Bianca must be picking up on the same good vibes that Abed is, because she next suggests they take a look at the honeymoon suite with a twinkle in her eye. They wait for the elevator as Bianca mentions to Annie (she stopped bothering directing any questions at Abed before they had even reached the ballroom) that they can provide an excellent list of things like florists, caterers, and bakeries. At the thought of wedding cake, Annie is enraptured.

 

"I can't wait to try all of them," she practically moans. "Screw Jeff's diet and his six-pack abs. I want triple chocolate. No, quadruple. What's the biggest multiplier you can have in a chocolate cake?"

 

"Jeff?" Bianca asks politely.

 

"My dad," cuts in Abed, and he catches Annie's eye as both of their mouths twitch, though hers contains a hint of disapproval at the reference.

 

"Remember when we bought that cake for Troy's birthday?" Annie says wistfully.

 

Abed nods. "I still say birthday cakes for Jehovah's Witnesses has the potential for an untapped market."

 

"It would have been nice if he could have come along."

 

"It was last minute," Abed lies.

 

"I know. But the three of us haven't hung out in ages."

 

"Yeah, but less people end up unconscious that way."

 

Bianca studies the inside of the elevator door with no reaction to the seemingly strange turn of the conversation and every sign of having highly selective hearing -- probably the biggest requirement for working in a fancy hotel, thinks Abed, Denver or not.

 

The honeymoon suite is ever bit as lovely as the ballroom, and absolutely huge. Annie glows as she wanders around. "Wow," she enthuses, "it's perfect." She looks in the closets, pokes her head into the bathroom and gasps about the giant tub, then makes her way over to the sliding glass doors that lead to the balcony. Abed drapes his and Annie's coats over an armchair as he takes in the room on the way over to the enormous bed dominating the central space.

 

"It's pretty great," admits Abed, bouncing slightly on the edge of the mattress to test it. It has pretty ideal springiness without the hint of a squeak.

 

Annie turns to grin at Abed. "You couldn't leave us alone for a few minutes, could you?" she says offhandedly to Bianca while keeping her eyes on Abed, her fingertips still resting on the balcony entrance.

 

And before Abed knows it, Bianca has promised to meet them downstairs and the door is shutting between them and Bianca's slyly smiling face.

 

Annie's jaw is open. "I was kidding. I can't believe she left us alone in here."

 

"She's pretty cool," states Abed.

 

Annie's eyes light up. "Yeah? You should ask her out. She's pretty," which has apparently become more important than the fact that Annie had up until this point been scandalized.

 

"She thinks I'm getting married," points out Abed.

 

"I'll set her straight," insists Annie.

 

"Maybe," says Abed evasively, and Annie doesn't press the subject, only falls onto the bed with him. She collapses onto her back and Abed follows suit.

 

"No mirror on the ceiling," Abed points out.

 

Annie turns her head to look at him strangely. "Um, should there be?"

 

Abed nods seriously. "Jeff said that was a deal breaker."

 

Annie stares at Abed for a moment before letting out a shout of laughter and grabbing a pillow from near her head to smack Abed in the face, which he easily blocks.

 

"He actually did say that," promises Abed.

 

Annie giggles. "I believe you."

 

They're interrupted by a buzzing sound coming from Abed's pocket. He rolls a little to get access and pulls out his phone. "TROY," reads the display, and Abed flips the phone open and brings it to his ear. "Hey."

 

"Wanna go to the diner?" says Troy without preamble. "We can stop by and say hi to Colby."

 

"Can't. I'm in Denver, looking at a hotel for the wedding with Annie." He shoots Annie a quick smile, which she returns.

 

"Hi, Troy," she calls, leaning towards the phone.

 

"Oh, right, you mentioned that last weekend," Troy all but hollers into his end of the conversation, and Abed knows Annie heard that. Her smile freezes and she stands up off the bed quickly.

 

"Gotta go, Troy." He quickly flips the phone shut.

 

Annie's arms are crossed. "Abed?" she says in her most deceptively calm tone of voice. "Where's Jeff, and why did he ask you to come fill in for him last weekend?"

 

"This is why Jeff didn't ask Troy," Abed deflects, using the time to try and calculate how likely Annie is to let out one of her famous screams in the middle of an upscale hotel. They were alone in the suite, yes, but she had to know the walls weren't soundproof.

 

What actually happens is worse, though. Annie's eyes start to fill with tears. "Why? Because Troy wouldn't be as good at lying to me?"

 

Abed wishes he had his chocolate supply with him. He darts his eyes around the room and spots a crystal bowl full of them, reaching out an arm and offering one to Annie. She looks at him incredulously for a moment, but then snatches it out of his hand.

 

As she's unwrapping it, Annie sniffles, "If he didn't want to help with the wedding he could have just said so. He didn't have to _lie_ to me. He didn't have to make _you_ lie to me." She pops the chocolate in her mouth.

 

"That's not it," says Abed helplessly. He promised Jeff not to say anything, but he hasn't gotten any better at negotiating the relationship between the two.

 

"Oh, really?" says Annie, getting shrill. "Well, why else would Jeff have asked you days ago to come look at the hotel for _our_ wedding?"

 

Abed says nothing. He can't figure out what to say that wouldn't be the wrong thing. From the increasing buildup of moisture in Annie's eyes, though, it seems that saying nothing is still the wrong thing to say. He considers pulling the malfunctioning trick, but the odds it would work on Annie are slim. He has a better chance of simply beating her to the door and out of the situation altogether -- Abed is still fast, and Annie is in high heels...

 

She's still glaring at him.

 

"He had something to do," Abed says simply.

 

A high-pitched "hm!" makes Annie's entire body jerk as it escapes her and she turns away, striding towards the door.

 

"Where are you going?" asks Abed, sprinting past her and leaning against the door.

 

"Home," snaps Annie. "I'm not really in the mood to plan the ceremony celebrating mine and Jeff's _commitment_ to each other right now. Especially not with you."

 

Abed doesn't budge. "You can't go home."

 

"Oh, can't I?" Annie bristles.

 

"Let's get coffee," Abed proposes.

 

"Are you going to explain?"

 

He pauses. "Probably not."

 

"Get out of my way."

 

"But I'll buy you a scone. And..." Abed considers. He won't technically be spilling the beans, and Annie being mad at him now is a more pressing concern than Jeff being mad at him later. "And I can promise that when you go home an hour from now, you won't be mad at Jeff anymore."

 

Annie takes a step back and studies Abed's face suspiciously. "You can."

 

Abed reconsiders. "Okay, maybe not with one hundred percent accuracy. But excluding a less-than-one-percent chance that he's somehow burned the place down or accidentally filled it with bees, you'll be much happier if you wait to go home."

 

The frown is slowly sliding off of Annie's face. "Are you...wait, is Jeff planning a surprise for me?"

 

Abed only raises his eyebrows. No court of law would be able to prove what he was trying to convey to Annie, but she's starting to smile anyway.

 

"Is he? Is it an early Valentine's surprise?" she practically squeals.

 

"I plead the fifth amendment on the grounds that I may incriminate myself," Abed rattles off.

 

"He is!" Annie bounces up and down on the soles of her feet, barely noticeable because of the height of her stilettos, but the gesture still makes her appear very young again.

 

"So...coffee?" Abed tries again.

 

Annie nods. "Okay, but I'm going home in an hour. Not a second longer. I can't wait to see what he's doing!"

 

"Coats," Abed reminds her, and Annie nods excitedly as the two of them walk back across the room to pick up their armor against the Denver winter.

 

"You should have brought Troy, too, if this was planned so far ahead," muses Annie. "It really would have been nice for the three of us to hang out again."

 

"It's cool. Troy said he's been there for more than enough of your relationship."

 

Annie turns bright pink. "Come on." She whips her coat around her shoulders and hurries towards the door. "I'm going to get you a date with Bianca on the way out."


	13. Troy Barnes, pt I

Troy had Annie cornered, having kidnapped her after her ethics class and dragged her to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee before she could barricade herself into a corner of the library with a fortress made of textbooks and semester-old notes in preparation for next week's finals. In a show of blind faith, Annie had gone with him, but promised only fifteen minutes before she was ditching him to study, and that she would not be responsible for where her hot coffee might spill if Troy tried to stop her. Not sure if he believed her or not but not wanting to take the chance, Troy had sped through the proposition he had spent a week devising.

 

"…and come on, I've seen your apartment. You can't tell me you want to live there anymore." Troy shrugged. "I just figured, if we were splitting rent, and now that we've both got jobs, we could handle a place between the two of us that's nowhere near fake penis emporiums or 'special gyms'."

 

Annie rolled her eyes, clearly not buying his sincerity. "Okay, who put you up to this? Was it Jeff? Or Shirley? Wait, it wasn't Pierce, was it?"

 

"What? No. Pierce doesn't know I'm thinking about moving out. If it doesn't work out I don't want things to get even more awkward. You know that awkward moment when you're singing alone in the car, and you turn and make eye contact with a stranger in the next car? That's what my life is like, like, all the time now."

 

Annie hemmed and hawed for a few minutes about how proud she was of her apartment and how it really wasn't so bad there before taking off in the direction of the library as promised, but Troy already knew what she was going to say when she came back to him the next day -- "Okay."

 

They found an empty unit over winter break that had been on the market since October and so was now being offered at a slightly reduced price, and by the time they returned for second semester Annie and Troy were roommates.

 

Living with Annie was very different from living with Pierce, which was exactly what Troy had been looking for, even if he missed the spacious mansion sometimes (indeed, he wasn't quite sure how long it took Pierce to realize Troy had moved out -- they could go days without seeing each other now that Pierce had left the study group and insisted on driving to campus separately since Troy always stayed late for group). Their new apartment was cramped and had only one bathroom and Troy's bedroom was half the size of Annie's, not to mention about a third the size of his old bedroom at Pierce's. The pair consequently spent most of their time in the living room, the only room with any space to move about, with Annie commandeering the uncomfortable futon and coffee table for her study materials while Troy set up camp across the room in an easy chair Andre had generously donated from his old bachelor pad while watching television -- "at a low volume," Annie frequently warned, but her powers of tuning out extraneous noise were truly admirable and Troy never missed a line of dialogue.

 

The two settled into a comfortable cohabitation. There was no chef like at Pierce's, but it turned out that Annie was a remarkably good cook. It was cheaper to cook for yourself, she explained enthusiastically, and so she had gotten pretty good at it over the last couple of years after learning the basics in rehab from a meth addict in her group. She took dominion over the kitchen the same way she did the coffee table, and she always made enough for two, so Troy was pretty happy with the arrangement.

 

There was the time Troy thought Annie wasn't home and so started singing an Alanis Morisette song at the top of his lungs, but instead of asking him to shut up, Annie just joined in from the other room and they even managed to finish on a pretty good harmony.

 

There was the time Annie made burgers on a freakishly warm day early in February, and they ate on their tiny balcony and then threw water balloons at the annoying neighbor kids playing outside.

 

And then, of course, there was the time he wandered blearily into the kitchen at two o'clock in the morning and found Annie in her nightgown, her favorite apron, and mukluks, her hair messily pulled back in a clip, furiously working away at a lemon with a vegetable peeler.

 

"Annie?"

 

"Hey." Her voice was brusque.

 

"…What are you doing?"

 

"Zesting a lemon."

 

"Actually," Troy considered, "weirdly enough, I knew that. Don't tell anyone."

 

Annie let out a little huff of air: not quite a grunt, not quite a laugh.

 

"Why are you zesting a lemon in the middle of the night?"

 

Annie turned to look at Troy for the first time with a slightly manic smile on her face. "For lemon raspberry muffins, silly! Anyway, I'm glad you're up, because I was afraid you'd hear the food processor from your room. Can you get me one of those little bowls from the cabinet? The ones we use for taco night?"

 

Troy did as she asked, but as she grabbed the bowl to take it from him, he refused to let go. "Annie. What's up?"

 

Annie's shoulders slumped. "You'll think it's stupid."

 

"No I won't."

 

"You will," she finally laughed, though without much mirth, "because it is stupid."

 

"Mm-hmm?"

 

Annie stared down at her mixing bowl. "Jeff's dating someone."

 

Troy let go of the little bowl he still had a grip on, and Annie snatched it away. "Ah."

 

"See?" Annie cried. "It sounds so _stupid_ when I say it out loud."

 

Troy, wisely in his opinion, chose not to say anything. "What happened?"

 

Annie paused. "It's just…he'd been so nice to me lately. Ever since Shirley and Andre's wedding we've been hanging out again, and he'd asked me to go to some work thing with him in a few weeks, and I'm telling you, for once it was going somewhere. it really was. And then tonight he texted me to tell me he's dating some girl from his gym."

 

Troy wasn't sure what to say. He and Annie had lived together for almost three months now. It had been just about long enough for him to realize that what all those articles and magazines he'd read about girls were true -- that they didn't want you to solve their problems when they talked about them. Not that Troy knew how to solve this one.

 

He settled for a nod and what he hoped was an understanding grunt. It seemed to be the right choice, because Annie brushed some stray hair out of her face and dumped the lemon zest into their tiny food processor, shouting over the whir to be heard. "So the other week we were talking on the phone…"

 

And for the next twenty minutes as Annie finished preparing the muffin batter, Troy listened and was, as far as he was concerned, a very good roommate. Or as great a roommate as a straight guy could be to a hot girl he wasn't getting to tap.

 

"I mean, what am I supposed to say back to that?" Annie finished as she shut the oven door on the muffins and set the timer. "'Thank you?' Do I say anything?"

 

"You haven't yet?"

 

Annie shook her head, looking suddenly exhausted. Troy stood up from the tiny dinette set where he had settled in for the story and said, "Sit."

 

"But I still have to clean--"

 

"Sit."

 

Annie nodded and sagged towards the chair that Troy had vacated, mumbling, "I'm just so annoyed, and frustrated, and… _embarrassed._ "

 

There was silence for about ten minutes while Troy cleaned up the few baking supplies that Annie had left behind; their kitchen was cramped enough that she had had to tidy behind her as she went to make room for the rest of the process. When the counters were clear, Troy took a wine glass from the cabinet and filled it with Annie's favorite pink wine, a half-empty bottle of which was almost perpetually in their refrigerator. He set it in front of her and sat back down. Annie drank from it after shooting him a grateful smile and then, as if the wine had been the oxygen she needed to be able to breathe deeply enough to speak again, said morosely, "It's just that he's made me into an idiot again. He makes me think that finally, he's treating me as an adult, and then he drops something like _this_ on me and suddenly I'm little eighteen-year-old Annie with a crush again, like I've been chasing after him this whole time like a pathetic little child with no shot, making up this whole thing about the Annie of it all, and he's just been humoring me until something better comes along."

 

She looked at Troy plaintively and, deflated, added "it wasn't like that this time. It wasn't. I'm not stupid. I know the signs."

 

Troy nodded and considered the possibility of going over to Jeff's place to knock him one in the stomach. His and Annie's new apartment really wasn't that far away….He liked Jeff. Of course he liked Jeff. But Troy had come to realize that living with someone in as close of quarters as he and Annie lived made a striking difference when it came to whose side you were picking. And for someone who had developed a pretty good history of being able to make Annie feel better when she worked herself into minor states of hysteria over life's crises, big and small, Troy had little to say. He wondered whether he would still be so unequivocally on Annie's side if he wasn't here witnessing the two AM aftermath. He looked at her, sipping from her wine glass, half moping and half seething, and decided he would be.

 

Annie wasn't looking at him, but staring into her half-empty wine glass as if it were a crystal ball. She had taken off her flowered and frilly apron when she sat down to reveal the pajama pants and nearly threadbare, tightly fitted tank top she wore underneath. Troy tried not to stare. He had been getting better at it since they moved in, which was good because Annie seemed to be getting more comfortable appearing in his presence wearing things that were definitively not demure skirts and cardigans. As he watched her, she reached back and scratched the back of her neck, then released her hair from its clip as if her brain had told her hand, "well, as long as you're back there." She wore no make-up. She met Troy's eyes again.

 

The oven timer went off.

 

Annie drained the rest of her wine glass and deposited it in the sink on her way to the oven. Slipping the oven mitts on, she bent over to open the door and check on the muffins. A delicious smell erupted from the opening and made its way over to Troy, who inhaled happily while continuing to study Annie, who stood bent over in profile to him. Annie in her thin, thin tank top, with her full breasts and tiny waist, pulling muffins out of the oven in the kitchen they shared.

 

"I'm little eighteen-year-old Annie with a crush again," she had griped. But Annie didn't have a crush on Jeff when she was eighteen, Troy reasoned. She had a crush on _him_. Annie set the muffins on the stove top to cool and Troy had a sudden flash to what things might be like if his eyes had been opened to Annie just a little bit earlier. Would she still be upset about Jeff right now? Or would the two of them be in an apartment very much like this one, but with only one shared bedroom? Maybe Annie would be wearing one of Troy's shirts and nothing on bottom, Winnie-the-Pooh style, while making these muffins because it was some sort of post-coital quirk of hers when she couldn't sleep. And maybe Troy would wake up from the smell, and come into the kitchen and wrap his arms around her from behind and nuzzle into her neck…

 

Annie was looking at him quizzically. Troy realized he was standing, not sure when it had happened. In her pale pink pajamas and flower-patterned oven mitts, she looked even more tragic and beautiful than she had that night of Troy's birthday outing, over a year ago. Troy thought about the little scenario he had just constructed in his head. He walked closer to Annie. He thought about the fact that he was the only current, male member of the study group who had never kissed Annie. He came to a halt very close to her, inside her personal space. He thought about Jeff, carefully composing a text to Annie that he had to know would break her heart, just a little.

 

He wrapped one hand around the side of Annie's neck, just under her ear and fingertips reaching the back of her head, and kissed her.

 

She kissed back.

 

The next morning, Troy was woken up by the sound of their doorbell ringing. In her bed next to him, Annie was stirring and letting out a whining noise that probably translated to "who is here this early?" So Troy sleepily kind of patted her on the arm and rolled out of bed as Annie crankily smashed a pillow to the top of her head to block out the noise as the doorbell rang again.

 

Much later, Troy would wonder if he would have been more surprised to see Jeff at their door if he had been more awake. As it was, Troy was not surprised, nor was he at all taken aback when Jeff asked to see Annie.

 

"Whatever happened to texting?" Troy grumbled as Jeff stepped into the living room and Troy stumbled back into the depths of the apartment to see if Annie would be willing to talk to him. She was already up and in the end stages of feverishly making her bed, having presumably heard Jeff's voice through the bedroom door Troy left open. Troy cleared his throat from the doorway and Annie's head snapped up, eyes wide. She relaxed when she saw it was him and not Jeff, but not very much.

 

Troy tried to give her a reassuring smile. "So…Jeff's here."

 

"Yeah," Annie said breathlessly. "I'll, um…I'll be right out."

 

Troy nodded. "I'm just gonna run to the drugstore, 'k? You need anything?"

 

Annie had already thrown her pillows back onto her made bed and was pulling a dress out of her closet. She shook her head without looking at Troy.

 

Troy told Jeff that Annie would be a second before ducking into his room to throw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Jeff was still sitting alone at the dinette set and looked back quickly when he heard someone approaching, but only saw Troy framed in the open doorway to his bedroom. Troy lifted his chin in a wordless repeated greeting as he passed through the kitchen to grab his jacket on the way to the front door, and left as soon as he could.

 

He walked the several blocks to CVS, slowly. There really were a few things he needed to pick up, but Troy was going to milk the excuse to be out of the apartment for as long as he could. He compared the fiber content of every brand of energy bar before taking a box of his usual from the shelf. He tried on every pair of reading glasses on the display before concluding that he didn't need glasses at all, and he flipped through the latest issue of every magazine he had read in the last year before buying none of them. When it had been nearly an hour, Troy finally paid for his couple of purchases and started the walk home, one hand swinging the cheap plastic bag at his side and the other in the pocket, clutching his phone in case Annie called him, telling him to come home or stay gone. There had still been no word when he stood at his front door, so he took a deep breath before unlocking the door and climbing the stairs to their unit.

 

No one was talking when Troy came back in, but there were definite noises from the kitchen again. He dropped his bag on the coffee table and, cautiously stripping off his jacket, ventured into the kitchen. He could now see, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, that Annie was back to work with the vegetable peeler.

 

When she heard him come in, she whirled around, but her smile wasn't manic this time. She had the vegetable peeler inone hand and a mostly-peeled mango in the other. "Hey."

 

"Hey," Troy echoed back, hanging his jacket back up.

 

"I'm making smoothies to go with the muffins. You want?"

 

"Yeah, sure."

 

She grinned at him, sweetly, and asked him to get her another mango from the refrigerator, which he did. As he closed the appliance door, the toilet flushed audibly from the back of the apartment. Several moments later, Jeff appeared. Before he and Troy could exchange more than only slightly awkward "hey's" in greeting, Annie cried into the blender, "Darn it! I forgot. We're out of orange juice."

 

"No we're not," said Troy smugly, and after taking a few steps through the entrance to the living room and back, he produced the carton he had just bought.

 

Jeff let out a low whistle. "Nice. Good roommate-ing."

 

"He's the Best Roommate Ever," pronounced Annie, glowing at Troy (who swore he could actually hear the capital letters in her voice) as she took the juice from him to add to the blender.

 

Troy drank his smoothie in his bedroom with the door closed and loud music playing. Annie had bestowed a title on him and he might as well uphold it for a day or so.


	14. Troy Barnes, pt II

The opening of the door is accompanied by a soft, elegant tinkle. Troy trails Annie into a storefront that's more like a cloud than a corporeal building: pastel, perfumed, and soft.

 

"It'll be so quick, Troy, I promise," she's saying, but she's barely even trying to sound convincing. Instead her voice is edged with glee as her eyes flit from dress to dress, taking in every bead and crystal. "Seriously," she swears, catching sight of Troy's expression. "it's just my first fitting, we'll be in and out."

 

Troy groans but checks, "And then cake, right?"

 

"Right," Annie smiles.

 

"Yesss," Troy breathes, clinging to the thought as Annie finds an impossibly young-looking wisp of a salesgirl to lead them back to the dressing room where Annie's wedding dress is waiting.

 

Annie gasps in delight. "It's so beautiful!"

 

"Annie," Troy says, "Aren't you supposed to have already done all the girly gushing? You picked out this dress already."

 

Annie turns to him, eyes shining happily. "Yeah, but that was the sample! This one is _mine._ " She turns back to the dress, making no move to take it off the hanger, just running her hands reverently over the lace.

 

"Annie," Troy whines. "Come on. The dress was Britta's job. Abed did the hotel and Shirley's got the caterer and as far as I can tell Jeff's not doing a damn thing, but _I get cake._ I've been looking forward to this for _years._ "

 

"We've been engaged less than a year, Troy," Annie says dismissively over her shoulder as she picks an invisible piece of lint off the shoulder of her dress. "And Jeff's on seating chart. With the people we're inviting, believe me, it's the job no one wanted." Annie pulls her hair back to the nape of her neck where, with a few twists of the wrist and a couple of hairpins pulled from the bag she had set on a chair next to her dress, she secures it into a loose knot.

 

"Hey, that looks like how Britta does her hair now," Troy notices.

 

Annie nods, tucking away a loose lock with the last pin. "She showed me how to do it when we were here last time." Finally taking the dress and hanger off the hook, she disappears into the dressing room. Troy sinks onto the nearest pouf to wait.

 

"I really do appreciate you making this stop with me," she calls through the door in her most grateful voice amid the rustling of fabric.

 

"Yeah, yeah," grumbles Troy, taking out his phone, unsure what he wants to do with it but needing some stimulation.

 

"Really," Annie's voice insists earnestly. "The way you guys are all helping out is just the nicest thing..."

 

"ANNIE, I'm already here," Troy says loudly, opening up a text to Jeff. "You don't have to guilt me into coming."

 

 _Your woman has gone insane,_ he writes, and presses send. As he's pulling up his Words With Friends game with Abed, Annie protests, "I didn't guilt you, did I? This is supposed to be fun!"

 

"Annie, am I eating cake right now?"

 

"Not that I know of, but I wouldn't put it past you."

 

"I'm not."

 

"Okay."

 

"So I'm not having fun."

 

Annie lets out a little huff of air. "Can you go get Rhonda?"

 

"Who?"

 

"Rhonda. The salesgirl. I need help with these laces."

 

Troy glances up at the closed door. "Her name is _Rhonda?_ "

 

"Yes."

 

He whistles. "Someone's parents did not predict what their kid was gonna look like very well."

 

"Troy!"

 

"Just open up. I'll help you."

 

"No!"

 

"Why not?"

 

"It's not all the way on!"

 

"Annie, I've seen you more undressed than that."

 

"You don't even know how undressed I am."

 

"No matter how few clothes you're wearing, I'm sure I've seen you in less."

 

"Oh, that's good, Troy," Annie hisses, "keep shouting it in the middle of the bridal boutique. Will you just go get Rhonda?"

 

"Fine."

 

While Rhonda and Annie are dealing with what must be an epic amount of laces from the amount of jostling and negotiating Troy can hear, he gets a text from Jeff. _Did she make the baker cry yet?_

 

 _Not even there yet, she made me come to the dress shop first,_ answers Troy before flipping back to Words With Friends where Abed had just played VITALS. "Annie?"

 

"What?" she pants.

 

"Can you spell 'douse' with a W?"

 

"I'm not helping you cheat."

 

"Cake, Annie. Cake."

 

She grunts. "It means something different with a W, but it's still a word."

 

"Thank you," Troy sings, and plays the word for 18 points.

 

He then hears Rhonda's voice, sounding like she's permanently inhaling helium, cry "Done!" as his phone vibrates again. Jeff asks, _Well how's she look?_

 

At the same moment Troy reads this, he hears the dressing room door open and Annie's voice asking, "How do I look?"

 

Troy looks up and feels his eyes go wide. Her hair is still pulled back simply, revealing a clear view of her bare shoulders and then all the rest of her, encased perfectly in white. Her cheeks are a bit pink from the exertion Troy had been listening to, though it's nothing compared to tiny little Rhonda, practically collapsed against the door frame behind Annie, panting.

 

Annie claps her hands softly and smiles. "That's your LeVar Burton face! Do I look that good?"

 

Troy says nothing.

 

Annie squeals and steps onto the little platform in front of the mirror to preen and admire herself. Rhonda, having caught her breath a bit, picks up a little gingham basket, pulls out some pins and gets to work on the hem.

 

"It doesn't look like we need to make any adjustments on the top," Rhonda declares squeakily as she works, and Annie nods, murmuring her agreement. Rhonda catches Troy's eye and remarks, "I have to say, this is the first time I've ever seen someone break the tradition here. Seeing the bride in the dress before the wedding."

 

"Oh, he's not the groom," Annie laughs.

 

"Oh!" Rhonda looks embarrassed. "Sorry, I just...I heard, you know..."

 

"No!" Annie exclaims hastily. "I mean, yes, he, um...I mean, we used to live together -- not like that or anything, just -- and then there were a couple of times..."

 

Watching Annie try to stammer her way through an explanation of their relationship leads Troy to rediscover the function of his vocal chords and tongue. "Two words, Annie. Bottle. Episode."

 

This successfully cuts Annie off, though she sends dagger-eyes at Troy through her reflection in the mirror. Rhonda just buries her head in a fold of the voluminous skirt and starts to hum nervously and tunelessly. When the hem is finished a few painfully wordless minutes later, Rhonda flits out as she mutters that Annie can leave the dress on the hanger.

 

Annie throws her arms up. "Thanks, Troy. You couldn't have kept quiet? This is a nice place."

 

Troy shrugs. "You could have just lied and said I was the groom. What does she care?"

 

"That's...dumb." Annie finished lamely.

 

"You told that hotel lady that Abed was the groom."

 

"Only for a little while," Annie corrected. "I told her the truth on the way out."

 

"Still."

 

"It's just different, okay, Troy?" Annie says exasperatedly, perching her hands on the stiff bodice around her waist.

 

"Why?" Troy asks, suddenly curious. "Because we hooked up?"

 

"You want to talk about this now?" spits Annie. "Seriously, now?"

 

Troy only shrugs again. "You never wanted to."

 

"You were the one who never wanted to! Well, not to me, anyway," she adds pointedly.

 

Troy freezes, knowing there's a land mine and trying to figure out where to put his foot. He quickly backtracks the conversation in his mind and realizes he was the one to bring this up. _Damn._ He's about to get Annie Adderall'd and it's all his own fault. His kingdom for a filter. "Hey, don't you need Rhonda to help you get out of that thing? I'll go get her."

 

He starts to go but is stopped by his own name. "Troy." She doesn't sound particularly mad, so he turns carefully back to her.

 

Annie's giving him a haughty, if amused, gaze. "I know you told Jeff about that night, Troy."

 

"What night?" Troy tries to cover wildly. "The Alanis Morisette thing? I only told him that to make him feel better when I found him listening to Kelly Clarkson on his iPod."

 

Annie responds only with a mighty eye-roll. It makes Troy a little dizzy just watching it.

 

Troy sighs, resigned. "Fine. I told him. I felt weird about it! I figured he'd find out eventually and I really, really didn't want to end up getting punched in the face. Someone always seems to get punched in the face," he pleads. "So Abed helped me plan the perfect way to tell him."

 

"What was the perfect way?" Annie pries, before crying, "Wait! Abed knows, too?"

 

Troy levels a gaze at her.

 

"Fine, dumb question." grumbles Annie. "What was the perfect way?"

 

"A quarter of the way through his third scotch," admits Troy sheepishly. "Abed did some field work for me first."

 

"Vegas," Annie realizes. "Jeff never would tell me what happened that weekend."

 

Troy nods miserably.

 

Annie shakes her head.

 

Troy mutters, "This never would have happened if we'd just gone to try cakes."

 

"I'm not mad," says Annie unexpectedly.

 

"You're not?"

 

"Well, I was," she rephrases. "But you're lucky enough to have missed that part."

 

Troy's trying to wrap his head around this reaction. "Seriously."

 

"Yeah." Annie sighs. As she takes a deep breath, her breasts press up against the corseted bodice and practically spill over the neckline of her dress. Troy allows himself one quick glance and then returns resolutely to her face. "We probably should have told him way before that. Well, _I_ should have told him."

 

"Okay," says Troy, hardly believing he's not being choked with tulle right now. "We, uh...don't have to tell everyone else, do we?"

 

"Oh god no," says Annie reflexively, and starts to giggle. Troy joins in, and before long she's fallen happily off of the pedestal into his arms, the two hugging warmly and convulsing with laughter.

 

"Oh god," Annie gasps, "I can't laugh too hard in this dress."

 

"Then your reception is gonna be rough, because mine and Abed's toast is gonna be _killer,_ " promises Troy as he squeezes that spot between her neck and shoulder affectionately.

 

Annie nods. "I don't want to scar that poor girl anymore. Help me unlace?"

 

Troy agrees and follows her into the dressing room, where he spends the next three and a half minutes trying to unravel the labyrinthian knots Rhonda seems to have accomplished.

 

"I, uh...I didn't mention when it happened," Troy offers after some silence.

 

"I know," says Annie, holding up the front of her dress as Troy starts to make some real progress and the back of the dress loosens. "I did."

 

"You _what_ now?"

 

It's Annie's turn to shrug. "Anyway, now he knows everything."

 

Troy's hands still on the untied laces. "Everything?"

 

Annie shoots him a mischievous gaze over her bare shoulder. "I'm sure it's no more than you know about him."

 

Troy feels a wave of nausea starting to rise in his stomach as a couple of very disturbing memories fight their way through many, many layers of consciousness in his mind. He suddenly yearns for the days when his knowledge of Jeff's connection to nipple play was only theoretical.

 

Annie, on the other hand, looks slightly pink and embarrassed, but mostly quite pleased with herself. "Thanks. I can take it from here." When he doesn't move, she takes one hand from the front of her dress and starts to shoo Troy out the door, pausing briefly just before he clears the frame. "So Kelly Clarkson, huh?"

 

"Yeah!" says Troy enthusiastically, happily forgetting his anxiety in his memory of a moment that was much more satisfying for him to walk in on. "I know. After all his bitching about American Idol, too."

 

"I think he just really hates Ryan Seacrest," says Annie thoughtfully, and gives Troy one more shove.

 

When the dressing room door shuts behind Troy, he pulls his phone out of his pocket. The text from Jeff is still sitting on his screen. _Well how's she look?_

 

Troy opens a reply. _You're one lucky asshole,_ he sends.

 

Annie's humming from inside her dressing room, and Troy recognizes the tune, breaking into a grin. He sings the next line: "Just give up the game and get into me..."

 

Annie breaks into the words as well: "If you're looking for thrills then get cold feet!"

 

The two belt together, "Oh, no, I do not hook up, up!"

 

Annie giggles and continues through the chorus in a high, sweet voice as Troy's phone vibrates.

 

JEFF WINGER: TEXT

_Don't I know it._

 

Troy grins and, taking in a deep breath, helps Annie finish out, "'Cause the mooooore that you tryyyyy the haaaaarder I'll fiiiight to saaaaaaay goodnight!"


	15. Pierce Hawthorne, pt I

Pierce supposed that pushing and testing people could be defined as a sort of hobby of his by now. At least, it was how he spent a lot of his free time, and he couldn't seem to stop himself from doing it.

 

So maybe it was more of an addiction.

 

Which meant he did laugh a little bit, out loud, when the first person to come to his den a week after the beginning of summer vacation was little miss Annie Adderall, whose own addiction drove her away from her parents and into a craphole apartment, several dozen of which could have fit inside Pierce's house.

 

Her smile was awkward and as bright as ever. "Heeeeey, Pierce!"

 

"Annie," Pierce replied. " Lost? Troy lives in the east wing."

 

"I know, he let me in." Annie shuffled her weight from right to left. "I came to talk to you."

 

Pierce waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the three empty armchairs in his general vicinity. "Have a seat."

 

The armchairs were oversized and weighed several hundred pounds each. Annie, perched on the very edge of the one opposite Pierce, looked like one of the Madame Alexander dolls that Pierce's mother used to collect.

 

"Cognac?"

 

She sort of giggled, but shook her head vigorously at the same time. She fanned herself a little and shifted away from the fireplace, which was currently housing a roaring June blaze.

 

"What's on your mind, Annie?" Pierce set down his own glass and settled back into the worn leather.

 

Annie twisted her hands. "I was thinking maybe we could talk about what happened at paintball."

 

"Oh, you mean that paintball game that I won in a blaze of brilliant glory?" Pierce couldn't help but add.

 

Annie nodded and continued, "I just feel so bad about what happened. We all do," she added hastily.

 

Pierce wondered if Troy was outside with his ear pressed to the door. Probably. Probably he had a stethoscope, actually.

 

"I'm so sorry, Pierce," Annie finished miserably. "The way that you saved Greendale...it was brilliant. And I just...wanted you to hear all that."

 

"So that we could be friends again?" Pierce clarified.

 

Annie only stared at him for a few moments, looking like she was trying to decide whether or not she was being mocked. Pierce recognized the thought process.

 

"I suppose we could be friends again, Annie," he mused.

 

Her eyes brightened and she nearly toppled off the enormous armchair. "Really?" she squealed, looking shocked and delighted that it had apparently been that easy.

 

"Sure," Pierce confirmed. "You always were my favorite, you know. One little argument during paintball won't make that go away."

 

"Pierce, this is so great!" Annie jumped up. "I'm gonna go tell Troy! Oh, and we're taking biology, so you'll have to register for that -- it's the eleven o'clock one with some new professor, Kane--"

 

"Annie," he interrupted. "I meant just you."

 

She stopped dead. "Oh."

 

Pierce shrugged. "I said I was done with the group. I am."

 

"But..." Annie said slowly. "...we can still be friends?" She wasn't quite meeting Pierce's eye, and he could swear he could hear the gears in her crafty little brain grinding away. It was Winger's influence, he was sure.

 

"Well, sure," he said, picking up his cognac glass again and swirling it around for effect. "As long as you're done with the group too."

 

The gears ground to a halt. "You're kidding, right?"

 

"You've said it yourself, Annie," Pierce reminded her. "The study group, it's toxic. Look what they did to me. You could be next."

 

Annie's resolve was no longer as easily shakeable as it had been once upon a time. "Is this another one of your tests?" she demanded. "Like the tiara? This is the tiara all over again, isn't it?"

 

The reality was that Pierce wasn't quite sure what he was doing. But he was still certain he was telling the truth when he said, "No, Annie. It's nothing like the tiara."

 

Annie threw her hands up in the air. "This is stupid, Pierce! Just come back to the group. We're sorry, and you know you want to!"

 

"Why?" needled Pierce. "Because you would want to? Just because you were willing to destroy an Asian man's life to make sure our group stayed together last year, Annie, doesn't mean it matters that much to all of us."

 

Annie made a noise like a hiccup but stood her ground. "Pierce," she tried one more time in her most imposing voice, but before she could go any further Pierce cut her off.

 

"And you can save the well-meaning hand-me-down advice from your mother. I know that trick."

 

"Trick?" Her voice jumped several octaves in indignation. Her eyes start to shine in the firelight.

 

"Sorry, Annie." Pierce shrugged. "It doesn't work anymore."

 

Annie's only reply was a disappointed head shake before she stomped out. And neither of those worked on Pierce, either.

 

Not at all.

 

Pierce didn't see Annie again until the end of August when school started back up. They didn't have any of the same classes, but he would usually see her walking across campus at least a few times a week and would receive a determinedly cheerful "Hi, Pierce!" no matter who she was with. From her companion Pierce would receive, depending on which member of his old study group it was, one of the following: a pointed glare, a fleeting glance tinged by awkwardness or guilt, an even more pointed refusal to acknowledge his existence, or an unnervingly open gaze.

 

Pierce never replied.

 

Several months later, Annie's escort across campus had become Jeff, almost unwaveringly so. Pierce never saw them holding hands or wrapping their arms around each other, but it was obvious even to Pierce that their relationship had reached a new level. And as Pierce made his way out of that year's Transfer Dance, he passed the two of them kissing like Al and Tipper Gore.

 

Another summer passed where Pierce saw none of the study group members, and he did an excellent job of convincing himself that what the members of his _former_ study group did with their lives was of absolutely no concern to him. Even Annie. This resolve lasted all the way until the third day of classes when the new semester rolled around.

 

Pierce had so far glimpsed only Shirley and Troy around campus and had received the usual non-acknowledgments from both. It was Wednesday by the time Pierce, walking past an oak tree behind the psychology building, caught a glint of shiny brown hair in the corner of his eye -- followed by several silvery glints from what Pierce had come to recognize as a many-zippered backpack. Annie Edison was making her first appearance of the semester.

 

...And something was clearly extremely amiss with the world today, because Annie Edison was wearing sweatpants in public.

 

Pierce squinted through his glasses at the absurd sight. The sweatpants were big on Annie, but not baggy beyond belief. They were dark grey and soft-looking, with hems trailing an inch or two past the heel of her white tennis shoes. She wouldn't have looked out of place on pretty much any college campus. But for anyone who knew Annie Edison, it was like seeing someone you'd known your whole life unzip his skin to reveal he was an alien. Pierce had probably been less startled by the discovery that Annie lived above a dildo shop.

 

Annie had gone most of her life without owning a pair of sweatpants. Her mother didn't own any, she had explained once when Abed remarked upon the oddity of seeing her in jeans and a sweatshirt, and Annie had convinced herself by the age of thirteen that sweatpants were not appropriate attire for the future valedictorian of Yale, even in the privacy of her own home. At that point Britta had asked Jeff to pass her the stuff to make another "sah-more" and Jeff had responded huffily, and the whole conversation had really just deteriorated from there.

 

Pierce wasn't sure why he had remembered that little tidbit at all. But here was Annie, plodding by him wearing a pair of sweatpants like it was no big deal, which meant it took Pierce a moment to realize she hadn't greeted him, and this spurred him into speech.

 

"What, you're not even gonna say 'hi'?" he grumbled loudly.

 

Annie whipped around, the ends of her hair briefly flicking into her open mouth before returning to their proper place. "What?" 

 

"So now you're just gonna pretend like I don't exist, huh?" Pierce railed. "Just like your boyfriend."

 

Annie's mouth got even rounder as she turned bright red. "I-- not-- you-- _you never even say hi back!_ Not once! I've been saying hello to you for a _year_ and _now_ you're mad when I don't?"

 

Pierce braced himself for the oncoming tantrum. He was prepared for insults, feral screams, and even expected that she might hit him. But instead Annie deflated quickly.

 

"Just leave me alone, Pierce," she requested as she slid past him and slouched off towards the library.

 

It wasn't until an hour later, when Pierce spotted Jeff through the window of his infectious diseases class retreating to the safety of his Lexus in his own pair of sweatpants that Pierce started to put the pieces together.

 

He found Annie sitting alone in the cafeteria later that afternoon, pushing something unrecognizable around her plate. When he sat down across from her she gave no signs of recognition, but Pierce wasn't sure if she hadn't registered his presence yet or if she really had finally started ignoring him.

 

"So you broke up, huh?"

 

"Yup," answered Annie immediately, not looking at him.

 

"He's an idiot," Pierce offered, both because he was pretty sure that was what you were supposed to say in this situation and also because it was true.

 

"I broke up with him," Annie corrected.

 

Pierce scoffed. "For being an idiot."

 

A ghost of a smile almost touched Annie's lips and she softly agreed, "Yeah."

 

Sensing an opening, Pierce took it. "But the sweatpants?"

 

"They're Troy's," Annie explained morosely. "I borrowed them one day when I got home from work and I just can't bring myself to give them back." She rubbed over the soft fabric covering her thigh, seeming to draw comfort from the sensation -- but not as much comfort as she apparently gained from the appearance of Troy himself a minute later.

 

Troy raised his hand half-heartedly at Pierce in slight confusion before turning to Annie. "You...ready to go?"

 

Annie nodded and swung her backpack over her shoulder as she stood. She smiled sweetly at Pierce. "I'll see you soon."

 

"Yeah," replied Pierce shortly, and the two disappeared.

 

He did in fact see her the next day, or rather the next evening. It was drawing close to dinner time when Pierce decided the rain outside had let up enough for him to be willing to drive home. He dropped the Caligula biography he had been perusing onto a nearby book cart and swung his book bag over his shoulder.

 

"Annie," Pierce heard from someone behind him. "Come on," Troy whined, dragging out the "n" sound in "on" like a small child. It was a sound Pierce remembered well, and he almost smiled.

 

Almost.

 

"That leftover mac and cheese is calling my name," Troy continued rapturously, and Pierce peered around the nearest bookshelf to see him hovering above Annie, who was camped out at one of the round tables tucked into the corner. She had textbooks open all around her and a notebook in front of her, on top of which lay her digital recorder.

 

Annie was pulling the buds out of her ears and saying to Troy apologetically, "I know, I'm sorry. I thought I'd be done by now."

 

"You _would_ be done if you'd showed up when I did," Troy claimed. 

 

Annie turned slightly pink. "Yeah. Um, I got...there was this...I was busy." She shook her head as if to clear the color from her cheeks. "I'm almost done, Troy!"

 

Troy pointed down at her suspiciously. "Be more specific. Your definition of 'almost' and mine haven't always been the same. And by not always, I mean never."

 

"An hour?" Annie guessed, squinting uncomfortably and shrugging her shoulders high.

 

"Can't you just bring the books home?" Troy begged, bouncing up and down.

 

"What if someone else from the class wants to come use them?"

 

Troy only widened his eyes at her.

 

"I guess..." Annie hedged, looking at the impressive collection she had gathered around herself. "Okay, then just give me like twenty minutes to make sure I've got all my places saved and check them out."

 

Troy sighed heavily.

 

"Maybe thirty."

 

"UGHHH," Troy began over Annie's apologies. This was another noise Pierce had become familiar with sometimes when Troy didn't get his way.

 

And it was this fact only, and Pierce's residual annoyance attached to it, that made him step out fully from behind the bookshelf and say, "I can give you a ride home, Annie."

 

He hadn't seen her look so surprised since...well, yesterday. "Are you sure?" Annie asked skeptically. "Aren't you leaving?"

 

"Nope, just getting here," Pierce lied smoothly and dropped his bag onto the table nearest hers.

 

Annie was starting to look relieved, and Troy was starting to look a lot closer to the exit. "I just have to make sure I've looked up all the references from today's lecture," she promised. "I'll try not to take long."

 

Pierce shrugged. "Whatever." 

 

"Thanks Pierce," Annie called quietly after him as he rounded the corner back to the book cart where he had put his book.

 

"Thanks Pierce," echoed Troy, already out of sight.

 

An hour and a half later Pierce was pulling his car up in front of the building Annie directed him to. A cursory glance around didn't reveal any violent crimes or drug deals currently happening, which gave Pierce a marginal sense of satisfaction.

 

They'd been silent for the majority of the car ride, but rather than getting right out of the car, Annie turned to him and chirped, "So did you have a good summer?"

 

Pierce opened his mouth to reply, but the noise that filled his car was a sloshy rumbling -- apparently emitting from Annie's stomach, from the embarrassed look on her face. He grinned despite himself. Annie giggled nervously.

 

Today the sweatpants were gone. If anything, Annie had gone to the other extreme. After a full day of classes, presumably several hours in the library, and a fifteen-minute car ride, Annie's perfectly tailored and coordinated clothes hadn't acquired the slightest wrinkle. Pierce suspected that they had been starched and ironed to within an inch of their lives that morning. The intense Annie-ness of the outfit, the glossiness of the hair...it all distracted from, but couldn't conceal, the lingering bags under Annie's sad eyes.

 

The word "fine" had been all ready on the tip of Pierce's tongue to be tossed out casually and end the conversation. But instead what came out was, "I'll tell you what, Annie. My first class tomorrow is at ten. Why don't we have breakfast and I can tell you all about it?"

 

"That sounds nice," replied Annie with only a little more apprehension than Pierce was hoping for. "My first class is at ten, too."

 

"So why don't I take you to Syb's around nine and I'll have you back in plenty of time for..." Pierce trailed off.

 

"Philosophy of Business." Annie finished. "The whole group's taking it."

 

Pierce gripped the steering wheel. "Ah. So am I."

 

"Really." It wasn't a question. Annie unbuckled her seatbelt, and over the click Pierce heard one more familiar sound, even if this one was technically in his imagination -- the gears in that plan-happy mind of her grinding into motion.

 

Before Pierce could come up with a response, Annie hopped out of the car with a sweet smile and a "see you in the morning!" But before she shut the door behind her, she leaned into the passenger side and studied Pierce's face. "Are you only talking to me again because Jeff and I broke up?"

 

"Oh, you two _did_ break up, didn't you?" said Pierce breezily. "Slipped my mind."

 

"Because I don't hate him," stated Annie. "So I won't be your...I don't know, your hating-Jeff ally."

 

"Annie," Pierce assured her. "I have several of those already."

 

She shut the door; he began to drive away. And in the rearview mirror, Pierce saw Annie watch his car disappear around the corner.


	16. Pierce Hawthorne, pt II

Pierce arrives down in the building's lobby at 12:13, and precisely two minutes later he spots the figure of Annie Edison through the window, looking up at the large number proclaiming the building's address. He meets her at the door and she greets him with a "Pierce!" and a hug, tucking her head familiarly underneath his chin.

 

She pulls back so she can look up into his face, beaming. "You ready?"

 

"Let's go," confirms Pierce.

 

Annie pushes the lobby door back open and turns her face to the sun, humming a bit as she shuts her eyes. "You don't mind if we walk, do you? It's not far."

 

For the first couple of blocks they chat mainly about the weather, how spring finally seems to have taken hold of Denver, how glad Annie is to be done with the worst Denver winter yet since she's moved here ("You'd think it wouldn't be so much of a climate change from Greendale," she muses), how Pierce is planning his first trip of the year up to his lake cabin. Annie's open suit jacket flutters in the breeze, revealing a floral blouse underneath. Pierce lightly touches the budding leaves of a low-hanging branch as they pass a small park.

 

As the two draw nearer to the restaurant where they've planned to have lunch, Annie comes to a sudden halt and turns to Pierce conspiratorially. "So you remember everything we talked about?"

 

Pierce does.

 

When he called her last week to inform her that he'd be spending a day in Denver to appear at some board of directors something-or-other and invite her to lunch, Annie asked for the address of the building and chewed her lip, eyes darting around towards the edges of the video screen. "I don't spend a lot of time in that neighborhood," she admitted. "I've really only been to one restaurant there, and it was good, but..." She started to curl her lip in distaste before her expression was dominated by the sudden growth of her eyes to three times their previous size. "Wait. _Wait._ "

 

She said nothing for a few moments until Pierce reminded her, "I'm waiting."

 

Annie looked directly into the camera. "Pierce, do you want to help me pull a prank on someone?"

 

"Is it on Jeff?" Pierce asked immediately. "If so, yes."

 

"No." Annie rolled her eyes. "Actually it's a little bit _for_ Jeff."

 

Pierce hemmed and hawed about whether or not he'd be willing to do it all the way through her explanation, pretending he hadn't known from the second she asked him that he'd join in on whatever her joke was.

 

Now Annie is slipping off her engagement ring with no small amount of reluctancy, but her eyes are already shining with the light of a well-planned trick. The ring is deposited safely into an inner pocket of her purse, and Annie lays her hand over the spot as she slips the strap back over her shoulder as if it's physically painful to have the ring too far from her hand. But she smiles winningly up at Pierce and, slipping her arm through the crook of his elbow, steers him around the corner to the restaurant's entrance.

 

Annie moves in close, hugging Pierce's arm to the side of her body and smiling, beatific and a little smug, at the hostess as Pierce requests a table for two -- "a private one, if you don't mind." They're led nearly to the back of the restaurant and as Annie slides into the cozy booth she asks casually if Andy is here.

 

"Andy?" The hostess's face is blank for a moment, then clears. "Oh, do you mean Andrew Cohen?"

 

"Right," says Annie smoothly. "We're old friends. Is he on today?" she asks again, as if she hadn't triple-confirmed through multiple anonymous channels that he would be.

 

Unsurprisingly, the hostess chirps, "Sure! I think he's down in the cellar now. I'll tell him to come by and say hello."

 

"Thanks so much," Annie purrs, the corners of her mouth twitching. She dances around in her seat for a little while after the hostess has disappeared, looking a bit like a child that really needs the bathroom. Pierce pretends to study his menu but keeps one amused eye on his squirmy young companion, anticipating the satisfaction of a good deception.

 

The anticipation lasts a long time; Annie's ex-boyfriend doesn't appear for quite a while. They finally manage to calm themselves down enough to order and exchange some small talk, both of them often looking away for signs of their expected visitor. But Pierce and Annie are nearly finished with their lunches when a reddish-haired young man rounds the corner, searching the occupied tables briefly before his gaze lands on Pierce's table, Annie leaps to her feet like she couldn't possibly have stayed seated for another second. "Andy!" she squeaks.

 

He's at their table in a few seconds, giving Annie a wary hug. "Hey, Annie, how are you?"

 

"So good," Annie gushes, "how are you?"

 

"Fine, thanks," Andy replies politely, and then his gaze lands on Pierce for the first time. His jaw doesn't drop open; it seems to clench, actually. "Um," he continues with a slight hitch in his throat that he clears quickly, "sorry I took so long getting out here. I was dealing with a new shipment--"

 

Annie waves his excuses aside and slides back into her seat next to Pierce, good and close. "Andy," she coos, "I'd like you to meet my Pierce." She lays her left hand on top of Pierce's, making sure to keep her ringless finger in clear view. Sure enough, that's the first place that Andy's eyes flick towards.

 

"Your name's Andy Cohen?" Pierce says in greeting.

 

His jaw clenches again. "I go by Andrew now."

 

"Sure," nods Pierce. "I bet that fixes everything."

 

Annie rolls her eyes melodramatically. "Oh Piercey, don't be rude. Now, Andy, I told Pierce about how good you are with wines and he insisted that we come in for lunch so he could meet you."

 

"Really?" says Andy, whom Pierce can tell is getting more confused by the second.

 

"Pierce is a great wine aficionado," brags Annie. "He even has his own vineyard, don't you?"

 

"Hawthorne Vineyards," Pierce adds. "I'm sure you've heard of us."

 

Pierce's hand slides lower on Annie's waist, down towards her hip, under the hem of her jacket. She kicks him hard with the pointed toe of her shoe and he quickly reverses the movement so it looks like a loving but "publicly appropriate" caress.

 

Andy seems to be realizing something, though. "Hawthorne? You're..." his eyes flutter wildly for just a moment and he looks half like Annie and half like he might be having a seizure. "You're Pierce Hawthorne? As in Hawthorne Wipes?"

 

"The very same," Pierce allows, and he can feel Annie's ribs jerking as she fights to hold in her laughter.

 

"I love your product," Andy breathes, his hand reaching reflexively towards his pocket for a moment before he seems to remember himself.

 

"Of course you do," says Pierce graciously.

 

"My mogul," says Annie affectionately.

 

"And you two are..." There's silence for several seconds, an unspoken challenge as to who will finish Andy's statement.

 

"Taking one small step for ourselves and one giant leap for cross-generational relationships?" finally says Pierce. "Of course."

 

Andy glances back and forth between the two, looks for a moment as if he might cry from frustration and finally bursts out with "What happened to Jeff?" He claps a hand over his mouth.

 

"Jeff?" Pierce says as blankly has he can.

 

"My ex, Pierce," Annie cuts in. "Remember, from the party?"

 

"Ah, yes," is all Pierce says, and Annie nods approvingly. She has some sort of intricate back story worked out and Pierce is under strict instructions to agree with whatever she says.

 

"Yeah, that didn't work out," Annie's telling Andrew without sounding a bit sorry about it. "I guess I just needed someone a little more..." she taps her finger on her chin. "What's the word?"

 

"Mature."

 

"That's it!" agrees Annie.

 

Andy's face goes bright red.

 

It's not long before Andy is beating a hasty retreat back towards the kitchens after a hurried goodbye, and Annie is smothering her silent laughter in her napkin as Pierce pays the check. It's not until they're back out on the street that Annie permits herself to howl with laughter, Pierce joining her as tears run down her cheeks and she gasps something out about the look on his face--

 

As soon as they're back around the corner though, Annie is retrieving her engagement ring from her purse and slipping it on, her not-yet-faded chuckles taking on a touch of relief. "Oh, I wish Jeff could have seen that," she sighs.

 

Pierce hesitates for a moment, wanting this to be a memory between himself and Annie, but then allows, "He can."

 

"What?"

 

Pierce pats the outer breast pocket of his jacket, where an innocuous-looking pen has been perched all through his morning meetings, and now lunch. "Got it all on video. I'll e-mail it to you tonight."

 

"You're the best!" exclaims Annie delightedly.

 

Pierce pictures Annie and Jeff crowded around a laptop later that night, a look of amusement on Jeff's face warring with one of revulsion that there was anyone out there believing that his fiancée was actually with Pierce. He grins. "Yes. Yes, I am."

 

"Pierce?" hedges Annie a while after the two of them have shifted into motion, walking back towards the large office building where Pierce still has an afternoon of meetings waiting for him.

 

"Mmm-hmm?"

 

"There was one other thing I wanted to talk to you about today."

 

"Shoot," Pierce replies, enjoying the feeling of the sun on his face again after the over-enthusiastic air conditioning in the restaurant.

 

"Well, you know I started talking to my dad again a while ago -- thank you so much for that again, by the way -- and he's coming to the wedding." 

 

Pierce knows all this, so he just nods.

 

"And I told him back when I went to his office for the first time that he could come, so it's great that he is, and he'll be my only relative there since my bubbe died, but I also told him I didn't want him to walk me down the aisle. And I still don't," she adds firmly.

 

They pass the same park they had walked by before, and this time Pierce strips one barely-opened leaf from the low-hanging tree and starts to shred it in his hands, dropping the pieces behind him as they walk.

 

"I wasn't going to have anyone walk me down the aisle," Annie admits. "Britta and I were dress shopping and I asked her what she thought about it and she gave me this whole speech that was actually only a little bit about the patriarchally oppressive practice of giving away a bride and mostly about me and how I didn't need anyone to give me away, and...it was really convincing. At the time." She sounds doubtful.

 

Pierce brushes the remainder of the leaf off of his hands. The tips of his fingers are a little sticky.

 

"I still think she's got some good points and all, but...well, my wedding heels are _really_ high," Annie says. "And it would be nice to have someone's arm to hang on to. Because, you know...if I tripped, it could ruin the whole wedding."

 

Pierce glances down at Annie's stilettos as they clack against the pavement, steady as a rock with every step. "Annie."

 

"Yeah?" she says anxiously.

 

"I'd be honored if you'd let me give you away at your wedding. Under one condition." He holds up a stern finger. "I want you to wear the tiara. And this time, I want you to keep it."

 

Annie shifts her weight from side to side and narrows her eyes at him, looking happy despite her best efforts. "It can be your wedding gift to us."

 

"Sure," lies Pierce, knowing he'll be buying them something else too -- something wildly extravagant for the kitchen, perhaps, that Annie will use, and he'll have it personalized or monogrammed or something so she won't be able to return it.

 

Annie squeals and launches herself at his middle. Pierce absorbs the blow fairly well, if he could say so himself. They stand there for a moment in the street, feet from the front door of the building Pierce is about to re-enter, arms wrapped around each other. A middle-aged woman strolling by double-takes at them.

 

"Do you mind?" Pierce snaps at her. "We're having a private moment."

 

Annie pulls back and smiles up at him, blue eyes shining again. "You know this is going to annoy the _crap_ out of Britta."

 

"That's about half the reason I'm doing it," Pierce assures her, smoothing down her hair where it's ruffled from being pressed against his shoulder.

 

Pierce receives a text message halfway through his next meeting insisting that if she's going to wear the tiara, Annie's going to need to see it again as soon as possible, because she's going to have to re-plan her whole hairstyle and it might need to be refitted--

 

"Mr. Hawthorne?" he hears, and looks up to find some obnoxious, ferret-looking suit glaring at him. "Did you quite catch what I just said?"

 

Pierce only sneezes in response.


	17. Jeff Winger, pt I

Jeff had been on edge for a week now, ever since he had made the restaurant reservations at that restaurant his assistant had found -- the fourth one she had brought to him as a possibility, standing hopefully and warily nearby as Jeff scoured the restaurant's website and declared it acceptable. Meghan's relief at completing her task had been short-lived, however, as the tension in Jeff's jaw had steadily grown and his temper had grown shorter and increasingly more brittle as tonight drew nearer. Jeff reflected, not for the first time today, that he would need to get Meghan some kind of gift next week to stay in her good graces. He winced at the mirror as he secured the knot in his tie and silently allowed that a hefty raise might be more appropriate, seeing as flying off the handle in Meghan's general direction while at work had probably kept him in check while at home with Annie.

 

Well, somewhat in check.

 

There was the time that he was digging through the drying rack to find his travel coffee mug and ended up knocking over and breaking the blender before yelling at Annie that he hadn't wanted the stupid mango smoothie anyway. She had pointed out that he still drank it, and he stormed off to work that morning without any coffee.

 

Then there was that terrifying moment when Annie had been folding and stowing away the clean laundry while Jeff lounged on the bed and realized with only a half-second to spare that she was about to see inside the seldom-opened drawer designated for his sweatpants, but currently holding a very shiny little secret. He leapt to his feet, yelling something about not liking the way she folded his sweats, and after Annie made her offended noise but backed off, Jeff thought from her narrowed eyes for the next couple of hours that she probably thought he had porn hidden in there. As if he wasn't clever enough to keep it in a password-protected, well-camouflaged folder on his laptop, Jeff thought now, smoothing his hands down over his suit jacket, his left hand flexing slightly as it ran over the lump in his breast pocket.

 

He pulled out the tiny velvet box and stared at it again. By now he had spent so long staring at the contents of this box that he could see the ring inside as well as if he had X-ray vision, but Jeff opened the box anyway. And there it was. White gold, a two-carat diamond solitaire. The girl at the jewelry store had complimented his good taste in a professional way -- Jeff supposed you didn't last very long at a job selling engagement rings if you made a habit of flirting with your customers.

 

Jeff snapped the box closed. Then he opened it again. Closed it, opened it. Closed it, opened it.

 

He considered retying his tie again. He might be able to get the knot more symmetrical.

 

He closed the box. Opened it, closed it, then stuffed it back into his pocket. He glanced at his phone, dormant on the countertop in front of him.

 

Annie was fifteen minutes late getting home. Ten minutes ago, Jeff had tried to convince himself that it was only because he had spent the whole week in such an agitated state that her tardiness had seemed so marked. Five minutes ago hehad called the restaurant and moved their reservation back half an hour. Now he was having traumatic stress flashbacks to sitting around for two hours waiting for Shirley to arrive at her own wedding rehearsal, watching Annie sulk about Britta's superior wedding planning skills, watching Britta get steadily drunker for the same reason, watching Andre steadily lose his mind, and trying not to lose his own cool over the recent discovery of his brand-new girlfriend's elephantine wedding binder. Jeff considered calling Andre, then immediately dismissed the idea as stupid.

 

He pressed the home button on his phone to display the time. Seventeen minutes late. He started to reach for the ring box again.

 

The front door slammed. "Jeff?"

 

Relief coursed through him, washing the mounting panic from his system, for just long enough to say "in here," before being replaced by rage. By the time Annie came tumbling breathlessly to the bathroom doorway, Jeff had adopted his least welcoming posture and facial expression.

 

"I'm so sorry I'm late," she panted, slipping out of her shoes and bending down to pick them up.

 

"Where've you been?" was Jeff's only, curt, response.

 

"I was just leaving work -- I was leaving early, even, I swear -- and Pierce called," Annie explained, waving her high heels through the air. "And I tried to tell him I would call him back because we had dinner plans, but we got to talking--"

 

"Of course, and god forbid you choose me over Pierce for once," Jeff muttered, glancing towards the mirror again.

 

Annie rolled her eyes, as always, looking for a brief moment like she was nineteen again. "When are you going to stop being jealous of a man in his seventies?"

 

"It's not like you can say you don't like them older." The retort escaped Jeff's mouth almost without permission and he held his breath. There was about a fifty/fifty chance Annie would dismiss it as a joke. She might tell him he wasn't funny, but the conversation could come to a slightly awkward but civil halt, and they would still have plenty of time to make their new reservation time.

 

Annie's voice, however, came out icy. "Well if you're going to act like such a child at your age, maybe I do need someone even older."

 

"Annie, all I'm saying--"

 

"I know exactly what you're saying, Jeff," Annie declared. "And I shouldn't have to remind you again that without Pierce, I wouldn't have my job. I wouldn't even have my degree."

 

The old defense tripped up Jeff, and just like that, he found himself irreversibly at the mercy of the fight. He slammed a hand down on the counter and unleashed. "God, Annie, and that means you have to be at his beck and call for the rest of your life? He lent you money. You paid him back. Cut the fucking cord."

 

"Real nice," Annie cried. "Sorry if you can't deal with not being the only priority in my life, but Pierce is our _friend._ I haven't questioned whatever weird issues you still have with him, so you could at least cut me a little slack here."

 

"Oh, I'm sorry," simpered Jeff mockingly. "Did you need Pierce to complete your study group bingo card?"

 

Annie gave him a long-suffering look, gripping the door frame of the bathroom with her free hand. "Like you're one to talk."

 

"Oh god, is this about Britta again?"

 

"You're the one who brought it up!" cried Annie indignantly. "I'm just not going to let you trample all over me with your giant hooves of hypocrisy."

 

"'Hooves of hypocrisy'?" repeated Jeff. "Annie, that's not even a thing."

 

"Screw you," spit back Annie, pointing at Jeff with her high heels like a lethal weapon. "I'm going to get changed while you can remind yourself that you don't have a leg to stand on here."

 

But Jeff followed her back into their bedroom. It seemed that Annie had been expecting this, because she continued to talk without looking at him as she shimmied out of her pants suit and deposited the pieces into the wicker hamper in the corner.

 

"I'm pretty sure we decided to put this behind us. You know, I let go of you sleeping with Britta for an entire year, and you let go of me kissing Abed _that one time,_ " and it was the reason in her voice, her obvious conviction that she was in the right, and Jeff's suspicion that she probably was, that spurred him on towards the one topic he thought he would never bring up on tonight of all nights.

 

And so he said: "This isn't about Abed."

 

Annie slammed the lid of the hamper shut and turned to face him, clad only in her underwear. "Wait, this isn't actually about Pierce, is it? I thought you were kidding. God, Jeff, I know you don't always get along, but--"

 

"It's not about Pierce."

 

Annie's chest started to flush pink and Jeff knew that she had gotten there, that she had reached the correct conclusion, but she opened the top drawer of her dresser, took out a slip as nonchalantly as she could, and said, "Then I don't know what you're on about."

 

While her face was hidden from view by the thin fabric of her slip as she pulled it over her head, Jeff dropped the bomb. "Troy."

 

Annie's face appeared again, like they were playing a highly adult version of peek-a-boo. Now she was chalk white and her lips were pressed into a thin line.

 

"What, did you think I didn't know?" Jeff said caustically. "He told me, Annie."

 

Annie's eyes flashed. "So what?" Her voice shook a tiny bit, but she tossed back her hair and plowed on, "I don't have anything to apologize for. I was single, and he was single, and you were dating someone else, if you'll recall!"

 

For a moment Jeff almost forgets his agitation. "Wait -- what?"

 

"Oh, did you think I wouldn't remember?" cries Annie smugly. "That woman from your gym! Where's your high horse now, Custer?"

 

"You and Troy--" Jeff managed. "That happened while I was dating Casey?"

 

Annie, noticing that Jeff's volume had lowered, crossed her arms uncertainly. Jeff had a vision of her storming into the men's room in blue ruffles to demand answers of him that he didn't know how to give, once upon a time.

 

Now he wanted some answers of his own.

 

"That relationship lasted like eighteen hours, Annie," Jeff reminded her. "The eighteen hours before you and I decided to give it a shot."

 

"Before _you_ decided you were ready," Annie corrected, but without bite.

 

Jeff ran a hand over his face while Annie stood in front of him, looking quite miserable.

 

"I just..." Annie trailed off before letting out a frustrated growl. "God, Jeff, do you still not have any idea how much that sucked for me? Like, do I actually have to explain it to you?"

 

Jeff shook his head mutely, desperately wanting to demand the explanation but suddenly knowing he didn't actually want to hear it. He had been bouncing off the walls at the almost-negligible prospect of Annie saying "no" to his proposal for a week. It was so easy to forget, living in their reconstructed lives away from Greendale, that once upon a time he had kept her on tenterhooks for months, even years at a time. It was the realization that she wouldn't be waiting around for him forever that had driven him to her and Troy's door that morning years ago.

 

He just never expected to discover that she had waited one less day than he had needed to figure it out.

 

"Maybe we should just stay home tonight," Annie suggested morosely.

 

"No," came out of Jeff's mouth reflexively, and he froze. Annie gazed at him, waiting for further explanation. Jeff's heart pounded, feeling like it was hitting right up against the ring he had stashed in the breast pocket of his dress shirt.

 

The image of Annie and Troy still lingered in his brain, unwilling to be shaken away like an Etch-a-Sketch picture. Jeff still had every element of Annie's appearance that morning memorized. The robe she had thrown on hastily over her pajamas -- were they also hastily thrown on, he now wondered? The red mark on her cheek from a fold in her pillowcase as she padded tentatively into the kitchen where Jeff sat waiting. His image of Troy from that morning is less detailed, but the picture has no less of an effect on Jeff: the two of them intertwined in Annie's bed, a bed Jeff became very familiar with soon after, as Jeff shifted his weight from foot to foot outside their front door mere feet away, trying to work up the nerve to knock...

 

The ring weighed heavy in his pocket. Jeff stood up as straight as he could, sure that the burden of it was making him lean distinctly forward and that Annie would know. He wanted to get this ring out of his pocket.

 

He wanted to put this ring on Annie's finger. Tonight.

 

"I'm sorry," Jeff blurted out.

 

Annie's mouth opened. No sound came out. It closed.

 

"Not just for tonight," Jeff continued. "I've been an ass all week."

 

Annie made an affirmative humming sort of squeak.

 

"It's not you," Jeff half-lied. "It's...well, it's hard to explain. But believe me when I say that I'm pretty sure the only thing that will fix it will be for you to finish getting dressed and come out to this dinner with me."

 

He could see Annie melting, or at the very least thawing. She never did have a poker face to speak of. Although, Jeff mused, feeling a frown start to wrinkle his brow and eying his girlfriend uncertainly, it may be time to rethink that assumption.

 

Annie wrinkled her own brow to match Jeff's. "You're looking at me like you're going to pat me."

 

"Last thing on my mind," Jeff promised, and he slid his hands along the silky material at her waist and kissed her.


	18. Jeff Winger, pt II

Jeff leans back against the door to the dressing room. "Annie, come on. Britta was actually right about something;" (which earns him a smack to the arm) "if you stay in there by yourself you're just gonna keep working yourself into a panic."

 

"Psychologists should not be allowed to be maids of honor!" comes a high-pitched cry from the other side of the door.

 

"Well, she's gone now," lies Jeff with a pointed look at Britta, who rolls her eyes and quickly disappears to make his statement true. "So it's just you and me, kid. Come on."

 

"'Come on, kid,'" Annie repeats through the door in that pale imitation of a sarcastic voice that Jeff hates. "Seriously? You can't do any better than that?"

 

"Well, I need to conserve my super-speechmaking abilities since I decided to improvise my vows. Right now I'm leaning towards starting with 'if you peed your pants, I'd still love you,' but who knows what'll come out in the mo--"

 

The door flies open to Annie squawking "WHAT!" but before she can even finish the word, Jeff has slipped in past her and shut the door behind him.

 

"Gotcha."

 

Annie's eyes start to well with tears. "That's not funny."

 

"Hey, hey, hey," Jeff tries as he smoothes his hands up and down her back and over her shoulders, cautious not to pull her fully into him so she won't ruin his tuxedo. "You're gonna...wreck your makeup, or something."

 

"It's waterproof," says Annie in a shaking voice. "I even tested it by watching 'Moulin Rouge' with Troy."

 

"All right, well, just...try and breathe, hmm?"

 

Annie takes in a few heaving, shaking breaths and her eyes seem to clear. "There we go. Now, use your words. Is something wrong with your dress?"

 

"No."

 

"Then why--" Jeff eyes the soft terrycloth robe she's wearing.

 

Annie rolls her eyes. "Well I couldn't let you see me in it!"

 

"I thought you weren't going to let me in." He smirks, which gets him another eye roll and also another smack on the arm. "Is it something with the seating?"

 

"No."

 

"The hydrangeas?"

 

"No."

 

"The justice of the peace?"

 

"No."

 

"It's not your dad, is it?" Jeff looks over his shoulder at the closed door.

 

"No, that's all fine," Annie insists.

 

"So where's my optimistic girl, hmm? The same one that's been telling me for almost a decade that she really thinks Lindsay Lohan is going to pull it together this time?"

 

Annie shakes her head sadly. "Not anymore. There's no coming back from a collaboration with Mel Gibson."

 

Jeff frowns at her. "So there's no problem with the wardrobe, the ceremony, or the people attending it."

 

Annie shakes her head.

 

Jeff drops his hands from her shoulders. "Huh."

 

Annie grabs his hands before he can shove them in his pockets. "And not you! God, of course there's no problem with you! Look at you!"

 

Jeff obliges with a nearby mirror, adjusting an errant hair before he receives smack to the arm number three. When he looks back at Annie, though, she's finally smiling.

 

"Yes, you look fantastic. You're a stud, you're James Bond, you're a more handsome Ryan Seacrest. Everyone in this room knows it."

 

"Well then it would be a shame to waste all this beauty on just the two of us in your dressing room, right?" Jeff says patiently. "Here's a thought -- there's a whole ballroom full of people out there waiting to get to stare at us for hours."

 

"You would turn our wedding day into a honeymoon for your ego," says Annie, her smile straining a bit. "Now I know why you proposed in the first place. You may not believe in marriage, but you sure believe in your face."

 

Jeff raises his eyebrows at her, sure she's finally going to blurt out whatever's bothering her without realizing she's doing it until she runs out of breath. Instead she takes his face in her hands and kisses him, hard, and though Jeff knows on some level that there are much more pressing issues afoot, sometime in the last several years he's finally come to terms with the fact that when Annie grabs him like this? He's going to reciprocate, no matter how inappropriate the time or place. He's got priorities.

 

The terrycloth robe gives him a good grip as he takes Annie's waist in his hands and maneuvers her onto the vanity table right next to them. She hums into his mouth, the closest thing to a sign of contentment that she's shown since Jeff was dragged to her dressing room door by Britta. Annie hooks one arm around his neck as far as she can go, so that his nape is tucked right into the crook of her elbow. Her other hand finds his jaw, his neck, any bit of skin that isn't covered up by the tuxedo that Jeff loved until about ten seconds ago.

 

Annie's attire, however, provides no such barrier, and the knot securing the robe at her waist easily falls into just two loose sides of a sash as a slim vertical line of her torso becomes exposed. Jeff's hand slips inside in a flash, finding the expanse of skin he wanted as he spreads his hand across her lower back. Annie nips at his lower lip, sucks it into her mouth, runs her tongue along it while she has control. Jeff finds her spine and works his fingers all the way up, bump by bump, until he reaches the back of her neck, where he gives her a squeeze before sliding all five of his fingers through her hair, as far as they'll go, so that he's practically holding the entire back of her head like an NBA player palming a basketball. His other hand goes to guide her bare thigh to his waist, but Annie's way ahead of him and so he just presses her knee to his hip while her calf runs up and down the length of his own thigh.

 

"So, you guys are supposed to start getting married now," announces Britta from the other side of the door.

 

Jeff groans in annoyance before even breaking the kiss, then pulls just far enough from Annie to look her in the eye and whisper evenly, "That's two." He punctuates the statement by holding up the hand that had been on her knee with two fingers in the air. "She gets one more of those and then she is _out._ " He tilts his face to the ceiling in a frustrated bid for control before relinquishing his hold on Annie to cross over to the door. "We need ten more minutes," he says to Britta through the door. "Annie needs to get her dress on."

 

"You guys," whines Britta.

 

"I didn't want him to see me in it, that's all!" yelps Annie, turning pink, still perched on the vanity but tying her robe shut. Jeff pouts at her.

 

"Well, either way--"

 

"Just tell them we'll be starting a little late," interrupts Jeff. "It's not like any of them have anywhere else to go. Hell, let Abed do his standup if he wants, just leave us alone!"

 

Britta's voice snipes back, "You know, I'm the maid of honor. _I'm_ supposed to be the one in there right now."

 

"Britta, if you go right now and exercise your weird wedding powers to buy us ten minutes, I will tell you another sixty seconds of the story of the time I visited my father's grave."

 

There's a pause. "Two minutes."

 

"Ninety seconds."

 

"Fine," comes Britta's muffled voice. "But I get to be the one with the stopwatch this time!"

 

Quick footsteps indicate that she's running away, either to set her stalling tactics into motion or to make sure Jeff doesn't have time to shoot down her stopwatch condition. He turns back to Annie, who has hopped down from the table and is already checking her makeup for signs of dishevelment in the mirror, until she suddenly stands up straight.

 

"Oh crap, I need Britta's help to lace me into my dress!"

 

Jeff, still trying to use deep breaths to send his body the message that _it's not happening right now, so calm down,_ nods. "Yeah, okay. I'll go get her." He can't stop himself from coming up behind her and nuzzling her neck one last time. "So I'll...see you out there." he adds, trying to sound casual about the gravity of what he's actually saying, as well as Annie's seemingly seamless switch back into wedding prep mode.

 

"That's the plan. If you're sure you're not going to change your mind." Annie's voice is playful, but this time there's something to their old joke that Jeff's never seen in her eyes before, reflected back at him in the mirror.

 

"Annie?"

 

"What?"

 

"What's up?"

 

Her eyes go wide in a way that seems studied now. "Nothing."

 

"Annie."

 

"Nothing!"

 

Jeff turns her to face him. One hand tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, and the other palms the crown of her head, his fingers once again spreading across her scalp and tilting her head back so her face is pointed directly at him, rather than him getting her gaze through her eyelashes.

 

"If you've got something to say, Annie, this is the time. Right now. Because there's no predicting what Abed will do if you decide you need to say something in the middle of the ceremony, but I guarantee we don't want to find out what it is."

 

Annie only breathes, drinking in the eye contact like water.

 

He says her name one more time.

 

"Annie."

 

"You're sure you're not going to change your mind?" she nearly whispers.

 

"Is this verbal agreement legally binding?"

 

Annie stamps her foot.

 

"Yes, Annie, I'm sure."

 

"You've changed your mind about me before," she points out painfully.

 

Jeff shakes his head. "I never changed my mind about you. I changed my mind about us."

 

"Same thing."

 

"Not the same thing."

 

Annie just blows out a tense breath, still not looking reassured.

 

"I'm part of us, Annie," Jeff tries to clarify. "I changed my mind about me. And that was years ago, and it only took me a week--"

 

"Three."

 

"Two."

 

"Fine."

 

"--to figure out that changing your mind is stupid sometimes. Just because you form a new opinion on something doesn't mean the new one is right. It's just new. I decided we could be together. Then I decided we couldn't be. That second opinion was wrong, and it was stupid, and so I learned from that and I fixed it. We fixed it."

 

Annie's doing that thing where her head starts to tilt and her eyes start to soften. "I thought that Jeff Winger never learns."

 

"Well, you're a smart girl, Annie, but sometimes you're just wrong."

 

This smack lands square on his chest, which is just the way Jeff likes it.

 

"Go get Britta," she says, and the conversation is done, which is even more the way Jeff likes it.

 

Fifteen minutes later, Annie's floating towards Jeff where he stands, next to Professor Whitman. He's sure he's supposed to notice something about her dress -- it's white, right? And he should maybe be feeling some kind of trepidation -- he's Jeff Winger, right? And he had been expecting to be bothered by the sight of the man walking her down the aisle -- it's Pierce, right? (Though Annie swears that Jeff will soften towards Pierce once again when he receives the very special wedding present the two of them had worked on together, which she still can't mention without giggling.) But all of those things are taking the back burner to Annie Edison's face right now.

 

After all, if Jeff Winger's learned one thing, it's how to prioritize.


	19. Patrick Winger

I fall fully back against the bed with a huge exhale, eyes closed. The back of one of my hands rests against my eyes, and I'm pretty sure I'm smiling, but not entirely sure. After a crucial few moments in which I catch my breath, though, I look down towards the foot of the bed and the face I find there is definitely smiling. And _smugly._

 

"Shut up," I murmur, though Jeff hasn't said a word. He merely plants a (smug) kiss to my thigh and crawls over me so we're face-to-face. Suddenly recharged with energy, I pull him down for an enthusiastic kiss.

 

"How was that?"

 

" _Shut up._ " I grab the bottom of his shirt and yank, pleased when Jeff lifts his arms so it slides right off, and toss it to the side.

 

"Yup, you showed me." But he's kissing me again, driving his tongue into my mouth as I move to undo his belt, then the button and zipper of his jeans. Though I push his jeans down past his hips, though, I get hung up when I can't reach downwards any further.

 

Jeff laughs against my mouth. "Want a little help there?" he teases.

 

"Yup," I reply, undeterred, as I push at his hips to get him to stand up and finish undressing himself. He does so at lightning speed as I prop myself up on my elbows to gaze unashamedly, but I'm not alone: Jeff's eyes drop to my bare chest even as his boxer briefs hit the floor after his jeans. He kneels on the bed and starts to lean over me again--

 

A crackly whine sounds through the room.

 

Jeff and I both freeze. I'm noiseless, which is why I can hear Jeff muttering under his breath, "No no no no no no no no no no no..."

 

The whine becomes a defined cry. I let my head fall back against the covers, groaning. Jeff is already standing and snatching his jeans from where they lie on the floor, not even yet cooled from his body heat, and he pulls them on before he stomps out of the room.

 

Over the monitor, I hear a door open and Jeff saying, "Don't think I'm not keeping a tally of all the times you've ruined something good by waking up at an inopportune time. And for every one of them, I'm gonna take one naked picture that I can eventually show your first girlfriend." His tone, though, is soft and soothing, and the accompanying cries have already died down by the time Jeff finishes his threat. I roll over to the edge of our bed and grope around on the floor for the bathrobe I'd been wearing when Jeff attacked me on my way out of the shower ten minutes ago.

 

After I finally pull myself to my feet, I wrap the robe around myself and tie it securely as I pad down the hallway, following the sounds of my husband’s voice.

 

"You are gonna be a good-looking kid," I hear Jeff whisper as I reach the open doorway. "That's the Winger guarantee."

 

I pause silently in the entrance to the room, admiring the way Jeff's shoulders curve forward like he can somehow use them as extra protection for the bundle he's holding in his arms -- no, more like he's trying to actually close his body around that bundle, to lock himself around it like a cage.

 

I still don’t make a sound, but Jeff turns around anyway, seeming to know I’m there. Just above his folded arms, a pair of wide blue eyes stare at me from beneath a shock of messy brown hair.

 

Jeff raises an eyebrow at me. “Whatever it is he wants, I don’t think we should give it to him. At some point he needs to start paying for his crimes.”

 

I raise an eyebrow right back. “What, do you work for the DA’s office now?”

 

“I never knew true victimhood until you birthed this little savage. It’s been seven months of absolute terror,” Jeff protests, swaying slightly back and forth in an attempt at a calming motion. The baby starts to fuss anyway.

 

"I think someone wants his mommy," mutters Jeff, starting to pass Patrick off to me.

 

Even as I accept my son's weight into my arms, silently acknowledging again the lack of power to resist holding him against my breast, I say, "I think he might just be hungry."

 

"No, he wants _you,_ " Jeff says with a wry smile. "Who can blame him?" He steps close, bringing his face near to Patrick, who already seems calmer. "I haven't met a guy yet who can resist loving your mom, kid, so good on you for giving in to the inevitable now."

 

Still bent over, Jeff tilts his head and turns his face up to me with a smile like he's said something to be proud of, so I murmur in Patrick's other ear, "That's the first of many, many lessons you'll learn from mistakes your daddy made."

 

Jeff merely snorts, sitting down in the deeply padded rocking chair in the corner of the room and stretching his legs out in front of him. When he folds his hands behind his head, he still looks impossibly like the pompous, silver-tongued blowhard who reigned over our study group from his corner of the table all those years ago. His hair is now verging dangerously on salt-and-pepper territory, the forehead beneath his hair is perhaps just a bit longer than it used to be, and there are definite lines at the corners of his eyes, but the posture is undeniable -- as is the expression on his face as he gazes as Patrick and me, as if he’s astonished by what’s in front of him and that Jeff somehow managed to make it happen.

 

I bounce my son gently up and down in my arms while I sing softly to him. "If I had a million dollars..."

 

Patrick giggles and kicks, showing toothless gums as he gazes up at me, but Jeff is grunting before I even finish the line.

 

"I would buy you a house," I continue, ignoring Jeff.

 

"We already have a house," Jeff points out wryly.

 

"Jeff," I say, as sweetly as I can, "your options are either shutting the hell up or joining in." I tear my eyes away from Patrick to look over at my husband with my most angelic smile. "This _is_ a duet, you know."


End file.
